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Iowa Law Barring Books with "Descriptions or Visual Depictions of a Sex Act" from School Libraries Upheld

2026-04-06T21:38:28Z

When may public libraries, and especially public school libraries, remove books based on their content?

In Pico v. Bd. of Ed. (1982), the Supreme Court split 4-1-4 on the question. All the Justices agreed that books could be removed if they are "pervasively vulgar" or otherwise age-inappropriate. But four liberal Justices (to oversimplify) concluded that viewpoint-based removals are forbidden. Four conservative Justices concluded that they are permissible (because the government gets to choose what's included in either the curriculum or the libraries at government-run schools). And the ninth Justice, the centrist Justice White, concluded that there was no occasion in the case to decide the matter.

Since then, in Little v. Llano County (5th Cir. 2025), a 10-7 Fifth Circuit en banc majority concluded that the government can pick and choose what books can be removed from public or public school libraries, because the contents of libraries are government speech. And just today, a unanimous Eighth Circuit panel held (in Penguin Random House, LLC v. Robbins, written by Judge Ralph Erickson, joined by Judges Lavenski Smith and Jonathan Kobes), that the government likely has broad (though not entirely unlimited) authority to pick and choose what books can be removed at least from public school libraries. An excerpt:

{[Iowa law] requires Iowa school districts to establish a library program, which contains "age-appropriate materials, and supports the student achievement goals of the total school curriculum." "Age-appropriate" is defined as "topics, messages, and teaching methods suitable to particular ages or age groups of children and adolescents, based on developing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral capacity typical for the age or age group." The law expressly precludes the inclusion of "any material with descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act," as defined in Iowa Code § 702.17.}

[T]he standard set forth in Hazelwood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier (1988)—that is, whether the book restrictions are "reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns"—… applies to school activities that "may fairly be characterized as part of the school curriculum," and a school library is such an activity….

[T]wo distinct interests are at play: (1) a student's right to receive information, and (2) publishers' and authors' right to communicate with their intended audience. As to the first category, the removal of a book from a school library does not prevent a student from "receiving" the information. See Little v. Llano County (5th Cir. 2025) (overruling prior precedent suggesting students may be able to challenge the removal of a book from public school libraries and explaining a library's collection decisions are government speech); Pico (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (noting "the most obvious reason" students are not denied access to a book by its removal from a school library is "the ready availability of the books elsewhere"). The First Amendment does not guarantee students the right to access books of their choosing at taxpayer expense. See Walls v. Sanders (8th Cir. 2025) ("Students do not possess a supercharged right to receive information in public schools[.]").

To the extent Plaintiffs' arguments or the district court's decision finding that students have a right to receive books in a school library rest on Pico's plurality opinion, this Court has held that Pico lacks any holding on First Amendment issues because the narrowest grounds for the judgment was Justice White's opinion, which did not decide any constitutional questions. Other Circuits have similarly held that Pico has no precedential weight as to application of First Amendment principles. Llano County; ACLU of Fla., Inc. v. Miami-Dade Cnty. Sch. Bd. (11th Cir. 2009) (same). Further, we are bound by this Court's decision last year concluding [that an earlier Eighth Circuit], which relied on Pico to find a First Amendment violation, has been abrogated by subsequent Supreme Court decisions. Walls….

[As to t]he publishers' and authors' First Amendment claim[,] … the Supreme Court explained that "expressive activities that students, parents, and members of the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school" constitute school-sponsored speech, over which a school can exercise editorial control, "so long as [its] actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns." Hazelwood. Activities that may be characterized as part of the school curriculum, whether or not they occur in a traditional classroom setting, are those that "are supervised by faculty members and designed to impart particular knowledge or skills to student participants and audiences."

It is indisputable that the purposes of a school library are to enhance education, supplement classroom learning, and facilitate the development of students' knowledge and skills. A school library is curated by school officials, educators, librarians, or perhaps some combination of these people. It is supervised by educators and librarians. Given these aspects, under Hazelwood, a school library bears the imprimatur of the school and is properly characterized as part of the school's curriculum.

The book restrictions in [the Iowa law] address legitimate pedagogical concerns. The law requires schools to curate a library with "age-appropriate materials" that support the school's curriculum and student achievement goals. The law prohibits school libraries from including any material with "descriptions" or "visual depictions" of a "sex act." Librarians and educators do not have to import their view or understanding of sex act, as this term is expressly defined under Iowa law….

{[And t]he library restrictions are neither amorphous nor unreasonable.} The plain language of the statute prohibits books containing "descriptions" or "visual depictions" of six categories of specified sex acts. The specified sex acts are detailed under Iowa law….

[S]chools have a legitimate pedagogical interest in prohibiting speech involving sexual content. See, e.g., Bethel Sch. Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser (1986) (noting a high school assembly or classroom is no place for a sexually explicit monologue and the First Amendment does not prevent school officials from imposing disciplinary sanctions); Henerey ex rel. Henerey v. City of St. Charles, Sch. Dist. (8th Cir. 1999) (concluding sophomore student's distribution of condoms as part of his campaign for junior class president carried with it the implied imprimatur of the school and the principal did not violate student's First Amendment rights by disqualifying student for his conduct that ran counter to the school's pedagogical concern and educational mission); Lacks v Ferguson Reorganized Sch. Dist. R-2 (8th Cir. 1998) (holding that, as a matter of law, the school board has a legitimate academic interest in prohibiting profanity by students, even in their creative writing, and school district's discipline of a teacher who failed to enforce the rules and policies did not violate the First Amendment).

In the context of school-sponsored speech, actions "reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns" do not run afoul of the First Amendment. As explained by the Hazelwood Court, federal judges are not tasked with the responsibility of educating the Nation's youth. Only when a decision to censor a school-sponsored "vehicle of student expression has no valid educational purpose that the First Amendment is so directly and sharply implicated as to require judicial intervention[.]" …

The post Iowa Law Barring Books with "Descriptions or Visual Depictions of a Sex Act" from School Libraries Upheld appeared first on Reason.com.

Mesa County Clerk Sentence Violated First Amendment by Relying on "Her Protected Speech Regarding Allegations of Election Fraud"

2026-04-06T20:48:55Z

First, some backstory from NBC News (Gary Grumbach & Dareh Gregorian):

[Tina Marie] Peters was convicted of four felony and three misdemeanor charges in August 2024 for using another person's security badge to allow someone associated with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, a prominent election denier and ally of President Donald Trump, access to county election equipment involving Dominion Voting Systems.

In Thursday's long opinion in People v. Peters, Colorado Court of Appeals Judge Ted Tow, joined by Judges Craig Welling and Lino Lipinsky de Orlov, decided Thursday by the Colorado Court of Appeals, in an opinion by Judge Tow, affirmed the conviction, holding (among other things):

President Trump's pardon of Peters could only affect federal offenses, and not the state offenses for which he was convicted (a pretty well-settled principle, since the pardon power extends only to "offenses against the United States," which is generally understood as violations of federal law).
Peters didn't have any Supremacy Clause immunity from state prosecution, because such immunity just affects federal officers discharging their federal responsibilities.
There was sufficient evidence that Peters was responsible for false representations alleged by the prosecution.

But the court concluded that Peters' sentencing (which led to a sentence of 6 months in jail plus 8¼ years in prison) violated the First Amendment by "punish[ing] her based on her protected speech regarding allegations of election fraud":

During sentencing the court said,

There are many things in my mind that are crystal clear about this case. You are no hero. You abused your position and you're a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to [peddle] a snake oil that's been proven to be junk time and time again. In your world, it's all about you.

The court later said,

So the damage that is caused and continue[s] to be caused is just as bad, if not worse, than the physical violence that this court sees on an all too regular basis. And it's particularly damaging when those words come from someone who holds a position of influence like you. Every effort to undermine the integrity of our elections and public's trust in our institutions has been made by you. You've done it from that lectern. The voting public provided you with everything you've done has been done to retain control influence [sic]. The damage is immeasurable. And every time it gets refuted, every time it's shown to be false, just another [tale] is weaved.

… "[A] court may not punish an individual by imposing a heavier sentence for the exercise of [F]irst [A]mendment rights…. A sentence based to any degree on activity or beliefs protected by the [F]irst [A]mendment is constitutionally invalid." …

Courts have affirmed sentences premised on speech or associational activity when it was relevant to the sentencing decision. See, e.g., United States v. Stewart (2d Cir. 2012) (explaining that the defendant's public statements were relevant sentencing considerations because they demonstrated her lack of remorse and belief that her previous sentence was not serious); United States v. Simkanin (5th Cir. 2005) (noting the district court's finding that the defendant's "membership in a group with radical views rejecting the laws of the United States and … professed beliefs that he is not required to abide by the tax laws would lead him to commit other tax-related crimes"); People v. Tresco (Colo. Ct. App. 2019) ("[W]e conclude that evidence of gang affiliation is not per se inadmissible during sentencing if it is related to the nature of the offense and the defendant's character, not merely his abstract beliefs."); State v. Warfield (Idaho Ct. App. 2001) (holding that, in imposing sentence, the trial court properly considered the defendant's statement that he spared the victim's life only because she was white and explaining that the defendant's "racist belief system was relevant in assessing the danger he present[ed] to society, a factor that is unquestionably legitimate for consideration by a sentencing court"); State v. Schreiber (Wisc. Ct. App. 2002) (concluding that the trial court did not err by considering the defendant's poetry in imposing sentence because the poems reflected the defendant's violation of his parole condition that he refrain from gang activity).

In Colorado, sentencing courts are to consider "the nature of the offense, the character and rehabilitative potential of the offender, the development of respect for the law and the deterrence of crime, and the protection of the public." Here, the trial court's comments about Peters's belief in the existence of 2020 election fraud went beyond relevant considerations for her sentencing. Her offense was not her belief, however misguided the trial court deemed it to be, in the existence of such election fraud; it was her deceitful actions in her attempt to gather evidence of such fraud. Indeed, under these circumstances, just as her purported beliefs underlying her motive for her actions were not relevant to her defense, the trial court should not have considered those beliefs relevant when imposing sentence.

To be sure, many of the trial court's statements indicated wholly appropriate considerations. The court's view that Peters was motivated by self-promotion and self-interest, for example, was fully within the court's discretion to articulate and consider, as was her evident lack of remorse. But several specific statements can be read only as the infliction of punishment because of Peters's beliefs and statements about election fraud. For example, the court noted that her "words" were particularly damaging because of the position of influence she held; and it noted that every time her beliefs were refuted, she would make a new claim….

The tenor of the court's comments makes clear that it felt the sentence length was necessary, at least in part, to prevent her from continuing to espouse views the court deemed "damaging." But the court failed to acknowledge that Peters is no longer the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder. She is no longer in a position to engage in the conduct that led to her conviction. So it cannot be said that the lengthy prison sentence was for specific deterrence. To the contrary, the sentence punished Peters for her persistence in espousing her beliefs regarding the integrity of the 2020 election.

For these reasons, we conclude that the trial court obviously erred by imposing sentence at least partially based on Peters's protected speech. See Dawson v. Delaware (1992) (concluding that the defendant's "First Amendment rights were violated by the admission of … Aryan Brotherhood evidence … because the evidence proved nothing more than [the defendant's] abstract beliefs"); Stewart ("It is impermissible to sentence a defendant more harshly based on associations that do not relate to specific criminal wrongdoing, for example, or for beliefs that some might find morally reprehensible, or for critical statements made in public because they were made in public.")….

Thus, we must remand the matter for resentencing. In doing so, we reject Peters's conclusory and undeveloped request to require that the case be assigned to a different district court judge. Any such request must first be pursued in the district court….

The post Mesa County Clerk Sentence Violated First Amendment by Relying on "Her Protected Speech Regarding Allegations of Election Fraud" appeared first on Reason.com.

With His Grandiose White House Ballroom Plan, Trump Again Asserts the Power To Do As He Pleases

2026-04-06T19:45:37Z

Since President Donald Trump announced his plan to replace the East Wing of the White House with an enormous ballroom last July, critics have raised several architectural objections. Among other things, they have complained about the asymmetry of the design, which would result in a lopsided White House dominated by the new structure; obstruction of the symbolic line of sight between the Capitol and the president's residence; and the original design of the outsized portico, which featured a staircase to nowhere and 24 view-blocking columns. Last week, a federal judge added a legal wrinkle to these aesthetic concerns, saying the project cannot proceed without congressional authorization.

That decision, which the Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to block in an emergency motion filed late on Friday, reflects Trump's tendency to do whatever he wants, regardless of what the law says. "The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families," U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon writes in the 35-page opinion explaining his decision to issue the preliminary injunction that the National Trust for Historic Preservation sought in a lawsuit it filed last December. "He is not, however, the owner!"

Although Trump "claims that Congress has given him authority in existing statutes to construct his East Wing ballroom project and to do it with private funds," Leon says, "I have concluded that the National Trust is likely to succeed on the merits because no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have." Leon therefore concludes that "the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion."

The Constitution "vests Congress with complete authority over public lands," Leon notes. It also "gives Congress legislative authority over the District of Columbia" and the appropriation of federal funds. Those provisions "establish Congress's primacy over federal property, spending, and the District of Columbia," Leon writes, and the defendants "have declined to argue that they have any inherent constitutional authority to build the ballroom." That authority therefore must be based on legislation enacted by Congress.

The Trump administration relies mainly on 3 USC 105(d)(1), which authorizes the president to use appropriated money for "the care, maintenance, repair, alteration, refurnishing, improvement, air-conditioning, heating, and lighting (including electric power and fixtures) of the Executive Residence at the White House." Does the ballroom project, which entails demolishing the East Wing and replacing it with a structure that would be 60 percent larger than the White House residence in square footage and more than three times as large in cubic volume, fit that description?

Leon thinks not. "Section 105(d)(1) plainly authorizes the President to conduct ordinary maintenance and upkeep of the White House, and nothing more!" he writes. "The list of authorized actions—which includes words like 'care, maintenance, repair' and 'air-conditioning, heating, and lighting'—bring to mind things like replacing the lightbulbs, fixing broken furniture, and changing the wallpaper, not wholesale demolition of entire buildings and construction of new ones."

The government's lawyers argued that the terms "alteration" and "improvement" are "capacious" enough to encompass the president's plan. "A brazen interpretation, indeed!" Leon writes. "Those two words cannot bear that weight, for a few reasons."

First, Leon says, "the meanings of 'alteration' and 'improvement' are 'narrowed by the
commonsense canon of noscitur a socii—which counsels that a word is given more
precise content by the neighboring words with which it is associated.'" In this case, the neighboring words include "refurnishing," "heating," and "maintenance," which "strongly suggest minor 'alteration[s]' and 'improvement[s],' as opposed to "wholesale demolition and reconstruction."

Second, Leon writes, the Trump administration's reading of the statute is inconsistent with "the principle that Congress 'does not…hide elephants in mouseholes'—meaning that Congress 'does not alter the fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague terms or ancillary provisions.'" Those quotations come from a 2001 opinion by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon whom Trump has described as the very model of a "great" jurist.

The government argued that such canons of statutory construction have no place in determining whether Trump is acting within his statutory authority. "Please!" Leon responds. "The Supreme Court itself has made it clear that courts have a duty to locate the 'single, best meaning' of the statute, no matter the cause of action." That's a reference to the Court's 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which featured a majority of six Republican nominees, including three justices appointed by Trump.

Leon offers a third reason for rejecting Trump's interpretation of Section 105(d)(1): It "lacks any discernible limits." According to the government's lawyers, "virtually any change to the White House could be framed as an 'alteration' or 'improvement,'" he notes. "Indeed, some might even view tearing down the White House and building a modern skyscraper in its place as an 'improvement.' As Defendants have argued it, so long as the White House grounds are 'developed' or 'occupied by buildings and structures,' the President has complete authority to engage in whatever construction activity he sees fit. How grand!"

Finally, Leon notes that Section 105(d)(1) authorizes the president to spend congressionally appropriated money. It "simply does not speak to the President's authority to spend funds not appropriated under the statute"—in this case, the $400 million in private funding earmarked for the ballroom project.

To bridge "the gaping chasm" between that price tag and the $2.5 million appropriated under Section 105(d)(1), Leon says, the defendants rely on "a convoluted funding scheme that they argue permits the President to fund the ballroom using private donations." They note that Congress has authorized the secretary of the interior to accept donations in support of the National Park Service, which can be spent via trust funds. Under the Economy Act, they argue, the National Park Service can transfer those donations to the Office of the Executive Residence as payment for a "contract" to build the ballroom.

According to the Trump administration, Leon says, "this aptly described Rube Goldberg contraption authorizes the President to use private donations" for the purposes described in Section 105(d)(1). "While its legality is not squarely at issue here," he writes, "this funding mechanism is, to say the least, a far cry from affirmative congressional authorization. Defendants cannot evade the limitations of § 105(d)(1) and the 2024 appropriations act through a series of unrelated statutes that say nothing about the President, the White House, or the construction of a ballroom."

Leon adds that his understanding of Section 105(d)(1) is supported by "a nearly unbroken history of congressional authorization for construction and major renovations at the White House." There is "zero evidence," he says, that "Congress intended a sea-change in the way that it authorizes and funds construction at the White House" when it enacted "the relevant language" in 1978.

The National Trust also argued that the ballroom project violates 40 USC 8106, which says "a building or structure shall not be erected on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress." The Trump administration objected that "express authority of Congress" should not be read to require explicit permission to build a specific structure.

"Whether § 8106 requires general or specific authorization is beside the point because Congress has not provided any authorization to Defendants," Leon writes. "Without question, Congress has not specifically authorized the ballroom construction! And, as discussed throughout this opinion, Defendants have not identified any statute giving the President or any other Defendants freewheeling authority to construct buildings at the White House or in the District of Columbia."

The government also argued that Section 8106 "should not be read to constrain the President or limit construction at the White House absent a clear statement," Leon notes. "Please! A clear statement rule makes sense when Congress is legislating in an area where the President exercises overlapping constitutional authority. But Defendants here have disclaimed that the President has any inherent constitutional authority over construction at the White House and have conceded that Congress's constitutional authority over federal property is 'exclusive.'"

These considerations, Leon says, all point in the same direction: "Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!" But he adds that "it is not too late for Congress to authorize the continued construction of the ballroom project."

Trump "may at any time go to Congress to obtain express authority to construct a ballroom and to do so with private funds," Leon notes. "Indeed, Congress may even choose to appropriate funds for the ballroom, or at least decide that some other funding scheme is acceptable. Either way, Congress will thereby retain its authority over the nation's property and its oversight over the Government's spending. The National Trust's interests in a constitutional and lawful process will be vindicated. And the American people will benefit from the branches of Government exercising their constitutionally prescribed roles."

Leon delayed the effect of his injunction until 14 days after he issued it, giving the Trump administration an opportunity to appeal his decision. When Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for an emergency stay on Friday, he argued that "the President has complete authority to renovate the White House." Shumate warned that leaving the injunction in place "would imperil the President and national security and indefinitely leave a large hole beside the Executive Residence."

Maybe Trump's ballroom will fare better in the appeals court. Or maybe he will act on Leon's recommendation and obtain congressional approval. But his argument that no such permission is necessary, which relies on stretching a statute far beyond what its plain text can reasonably support, is of a piece with his attempts to rewrite other laws in service of his agenda.

Trump claimed the Alien Enemies Act authorized him to summarily deport anyone he identified as a member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. He argued that 10 USC 12406 empowered him to federalize the National Guard whenever he perceived obstacles to the enforcement of federal law. He asserted that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act gave him the authority to impose tariffs at whatever rates he deemed appropriate on any imports he chose from any country he decided to target for as long as he wished.

In all of those cases, Trump encountered resistance from the judicial branch, including Trump-appointed judges and the Supreme Court. Trump's legally dubious power grabs also include freezing research grants to universities without going through the process required by statute; attempting to deport students based on speech that supposedly threatens U.S. foreign policy interests; and threatening to revoke broadcast licenses based on an understanding of "the public interest" that precludes news coverage he views as unfair.

Trump's grandiose plan to build an unauthorized ballroom with a 40-foot ceiling that can accommodate 1,000 or more guests may seem trivial compared to the issues raised by his other acts of self-aggrandizement. But it reflects the same disregard for the rule of law and the separation of powers—principles that Trump views as annoying obstacles that can be overcome by the sheer assertion of one man's will.

The post With His Grandiose White House Ballroom Plan, Trump Again Asserts the Power To Do As He Pleases appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump's College Sports Executive Order Adds Chaos to an Already Wild Legal War

2026-04-06T16:18:26Z

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! If you're pregnant and about to give birth, maybe avoid hockey games—or else your child might be known for getting born during a 5–1 drubbing.

We're coming to you a day early this week with reaction to President Donald Trump's executive order that he thinks will fix college sports (it will not). We'll start with that, move on to some sports TV news, and close with thoughts on the Masters ticket lottery. Giddy up.

But first, congratulations to Reason's own Phillip "The Ultimate Fris" Bader on winning our women's bracket challenge, followed by Carl "Milwaukee's Best" Peterson in second. Yours truly came in third—smart enough to pick UCLA to win, not chalky enough to beat Phillip and Carl.

Locker Room Links

After bailing out the government authority that owns Progressive Field and Rocket Arena, Cleveland's Democratic Mayor Justin Bibb is looking at raising fees on fans and businesses to fund stadium repairs.
If you try to teach your underage child how to bet responsibly in New York State, you might get banned from concerts and casino restaurants.
FanDuel Sports Network (formerly Bally Sports Network and Fox Sports Network) is coming to an end soon after the NBA and NHL seasons.
"New Jersey cannot regulate Kalshi's prediction market, US appeals court rules."
England's Premier League is "voluntarily" (after a consultation with the government) banning gambling sponsors on jerseys starting next season. Now teams (usually smaller ones) are trying to find tens of millions of lost dollars.
Augusta National Golf Club is famously extremely protective of its image—it has at least 67 registered or pending trademarks on various phrases and images.
Volleyball on the rise: Two women's volleyball matches are happening at Wrigley Field over Labor Day weekend.
Elsewhere in Reason, our new cover story on presidential power: "Trump Realized He Can Just Do Things. Who Can Stop Him?"
Go Blue.

Michigan's best players are a guy Mick Cronin buried, a guy who was a bust at North Carolina, a guy who came off the bench at Illinois and a guy who played at freaking UAB.

Get outta here. https://t.co/cSUiYxV5un

— Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) April 5, 2026

Can the President Regulate College Sports?

This certainly isn't the first time Trump has tried to bring order to a chaotic situation and just ended up making it messier.

The president signed an executive order late on Friday attempting to overhaul how college sports function. The order says college athletes can only play five seasons, and they must happen during a five-year window (even though state judges are already saying otherwise). It also allows only one transfer (even though a 2024 antitrust legal settlement already said the NCAA can't restrict transfers). Any schools that accept an athlete breaking these rules risk losing their federal funding. It also asks the attorney general (whoever that may be) to invalidate state laws that are in conflict with the order. The order takes effect on August 1.

Yet by the time you read this, the executive order may have already been challenged and stopped in federal courts.

You might think the president would be more focused on the big issues of the day, like inflation or the war he chose to start against Iran, but anyone who's been a dedicated reader of this newsletter knows the president talks about fixing college sports almost every week.

Many people are frustrated with the constantly changing rules governing college sports, especially transfers and eligibility. A more proactive version of the NCAA may have taken the lead on these issues before the courts forced their hand. Instead, the NCAA has basically said there's not much they can do, and asked Congress to figure out their mess. Now we have rules created by lawsuits that are ever changing and different by state.

These rules are, for good reason, not something the president can change with the swipe of a pen. But the Trump executive order has made the chaos even worse. Schools are stuck between a rock and a hard place: follow the president's set of rules, or follow the rules that were set by various court decisions? They have to break someone's rules, and that's going to lead them straight back to court.

Apparently the real goal of Trump's executive order is "to spur legislative action," sources told The Athletic. But even rules passed by Congress are going to end up getting challenged on constitutional grounds. Attorneys' billable hours remain undefeated.

The American college sports system is weird and unique. No other country spends as much time, energy, or money on collegiate sports. But Trump's executive order is a great argument for getting federal government funding out of higher education altogether. "American universities spent $60 billion in federal money in 2023, more than 30 times what they spent in 1953, accounting for inflation," according to calculations in The New York Times.

Schools wouldn't have to worry about the president taking all that federal funding away over sports regulations if they didn't take any federal funding.

Stopping Streaming in its Tracks

Did you know businesses don't like competition, and often try to use the government to protect themselves? Fox Corp. and Sinclair Broadcasting certainly know it, since they're trying to get the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to knock down league broadcasting deals with streamers.

"Fox Corp. and Sinclair Broadcasting last Friday submitted statements to the FCC that effectively characterized the streamers as a clear and present danger to the local TV business, with Fox labeling the digital interlopers as an 'existential threat,'" Anthony Crupi writes for Sportico. Sinclair (which "operates or otherwise provides services to 185 TV stations," as Crupi describes it) seems to feel entitled to the NFL. Their FCC letter said: "Sports programming is also critical to the financial model that supports local broadcast journalism. Without high-value live sports on broadcast television, local broadcast journalism will suffer."

The context here is that CBS is renegotiating its deal with the NFL, and FOX is expected to be up next. The old-school broadcasters are worried the NFL might replace them if they get a better offer from a more cash-rich streamer like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or Apple TV. So now Fox and Sinclair are crying foul to the FCC, hoping for regulation or any kind of government pressure to stave off the streamers. The FCC's recent request for comment on sports streaming was, as I wrote, "clearly a shot across the bow of sports leagues—a warning that the FCC may consider regulating games on streaming services in some way, or requiring leagues to broadcast every game on TV or the old-school regional sports networks."

Threats to old business models are how a competitive economy should work. That's what happens when businesses innovate and deliver new benefits for consumers. Fox and Sinclair aren't entitled to NFL media rights any more than the Cowboys are entitled to a Super Bowl: You've got to be competitive and earn it. But instead of competing, Fox and Sinclair are hoping that whining to the FCC will get them some help. Since they're both known for favorable coverage of Trump, they might just get it—and totally upend the landscape for streaming sports in the meantime.

The Masters Ticket Lottery Is Dumb

With apologies to soccer, golf is the real beautiful game—and this is the most beautiful week in golf, as the best golfers in the world head to Augusta, Georgia, for the Masters.

But unless you have some truly incredible luck or truly incredible wealth, you probably won't be there in person. Augusta National distributes Masters tickets via lottery. If you win their lottery, you can get tickets for $140 each. Your odds of winning the Masters lottery in any given year are under 1 percent. If you don't get through in the lottery, you better have $17,000 to spend on a premium hospitality ticket. Heading over to a ticket resale website is not a great option. As I wrote last year, "You can try to pay through the nose for a pass on the secondary market, but Augusta National has a strict ban on resale tickets and might not let you in—so you risk spending $2,500 on a resale ticket, plus hundreds more on flights and lodging, just to get turned away."

Basically, as "Rick Golfs" points out below: "Now if you don't win the lottery, you are screwed. Almost no chance of ever attending. Before you could at least bucket list it and do it once."

What would you pay to attend the Masters?

The Masters has officially surpassed The Super Bowl and World Cup as the most expensive sports ticket.

$2,000 for practice round
$16,000 for Thursday
$8,000 for Sunday.

Why? The Masters has started cracking down on resellers, so… pic.twitter.com/GXMC2Z7Fcr

— Rick Golfs (@Top100Rick) April 5, 2026

Augusta National has every right to ban ticket resale, but their low prices are not ensuring the most dedicated people are getting in. Raising the price of a day pass, or just adding some extra steps to weed out more casual fans, would help.

Replay of the Week

The fact that these all happened in a one-run game is mind-boggling. Although I wasn't actually all that impressed by the first two, which were mostly just well-timed jumps—the last one shows absolutely no regard for his own body.

All THREE of Jo Adell's home run robberies from tonight …

Yes, you read that right ???? https://t.co/bc0Wb9i1Ii pic.twitter.com/axhyQFpLHD

— MLB (@MLB) April 5, 2026

That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, the Houston Gamblers against the D.C. Defenders and the beer snake in the UFL.

The post Trump's College Sports Executive Order Adds Chaos to an Already Wild Legal War appeared first on Reason.com.

$55K Sanctions Related in Part to AI-Hallucination-Filled Court Filings

2026-04-06T15:51:34Z

An excerpt from the 12K-word opinion in Heimkes v. Fairhope Motorcoach Resort Condo. Owners Ass'n, Inc., decided Tuesday by Judge Terry Moorer (S.D. Ala.):

Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. filed several pleadings which contained fabricated citations and false statements of law that he failed to check or correct prior to submission. The Court had already discovered problems with Mr. Eaton's filings when Defendant filed its first motion flagging numerous misstatements of law. The Court then issued two show cause orders regarding the misstatements, which were partially acknowledged by Mr. Eaton, though he has failed to fully and accurately address the Court's numerous concerns despite as many opportunities to do so.

From the outset, the Court notes that this case is not just about Mr. Eaton's most recent misstatements of law, but rather about a pattern of conduct throughout this case that raises significant concerns about his competency to practice law. In sum, the misstatements and misrepresentations were just the final straw. After a careful review of the matter, the Court finds that Mr. Eaton's conduct amounts to bad faith. Therefore, the Court SANCTIONS him under Rule 11, Alabama R. 3.3, and the Court's inherent authority and ORDERS as follows:

Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. is hereby REPRIMANDED and this reprimand shall be published as follows:

Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. shall file, not under seal, a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order in any case in any court wherein he has appeared as counsel and final judgment has not been entered;

Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. shall file, not under seal, a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order in any case in any court wherein he appears as counsel for twelve (12) months after the date of this order;

Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. shall provide a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order to any jurisdiction in which he is licensed to practice law within two (2) business days of the issuance of this order. He shall further file a notice of compliance with the Court no later than the third business day from the date of this opinion.

The Clerk of Court shall send a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order to the General Counsel of the Alabama State Bar for review. Though referred to the Alabama State Bar for any disposition it deems appropriate, the undersigned regrettably recommends that Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. be found incompetent to practice law.

The Clerk of Court shall send a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order to the Chief Judges for the Northern District of Alabama, the Middle District of Alabama, and the Southern District of Alabama.

To further effectuate the reprimands and deter similar misconduct by others, the Clerk of Court is DIRECTED to submit this order for publication in the Federal Supplement.

Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. shall pay attorney fees in the amount of $55,597.00 to Defense counsel for their time spent addressing Mr. Eaton's misstatements of law.

Pursuant to S.D. Ala. GenLR 83.4(a) and (h)(1), the undersigned refers to the Judges of the Southern District of Alabama a review of Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr….

The court begins by pointing to a wide range of past behavior by Mr. Eaton:

This opinion is the result of the cumulation of numerous issues regarding the conduct of Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. ("Mr. Eaton"). First, near the outset of this case, Mr. Eaton failed to include a jury demand in both complaints. Though he later stated during the scheduling conference that he wanted a jury, he still failed to make the proper request. The Court laid out a roadmap early on for how Mr. Eaton should proceed to demand a jury, yet he failed to follow it. While not sanctionable, this was the first instance where the Court saw Mr. Eaton display a lack of diligence.

Next, the Court notes that Mr. Eaton kept running into problems with co-counsel, to the point where they would seek to withdraw. Correspondence between Mr. Eaton his co-counsel also indicated that Mr. Eaton would file motions over their objections or would place their signature on the motions without consent.

The next incident demonstrating Mr. Eaton's lack of diligence which came to the attention of the Court was when Mr. Eaton failed to engage with counsel for Defendant in drafting and contributing to the joint pretrial document, as required by the Court's standing pretrial order. See The Court could have dismissed the case at that point, but it chose not to, so as not to punish the clients for Mr. Eaton's lack of diligence, again.

As for trial, Mr. Eaton informed the Court at the pretrial conference that he anticipated that he would need "two days […] [i]f not less" to present the liability portion of the case. Mr. Eaton ultimately took approximately 12 days to present his case, 6 times the estimate he provided during the pretrial conference.

As the Court reflects on the trial, it agrees that Mr. Eaton's liability portion should have only taken approximately two days in the hands of competent counsel. Yet, Mr. Eaton appeared [at] trial woefully unprepared—so unprepared, in fact, that the Court found it needed to impose time limits to Mr. Eaton's questioning of witnesses to keep things moving. Prior to imposing the time limits, which the Court was loathe to do, the Court mentioned the plodding, rambling, unfocused, nature of the examinations in hopes that Mr. Eaton would keep things moving and on task. Mr. Eaton often appeared unsure of what questions to ask the witnesses that he chose to call during his presentation of the evidence, instead coming up with questions on the fly and going on a fishing expedition for information which seemed largely irrelevant to the case at hand.

In many instances, several minutes would pass between the witnesses answering a question and Mr. Eaton asking the next question. It appeared that he called witnesse[s] simply because they appeared in the gallery to watch, and to serve as discovery for his related state cases. Mr. Eaton's lack of preparedness at trial resulted in substantial delays that, quite frankly, wasted the Court's time.

Even before, and certainly by the conclusion of trial, the Court had increasing concerns about Mr. Eaton's competency to practice law. The Court opted not to consider sanctions at those prior junctures because the case was almost over and the Court did not want the poor and ineffective advocacy infecting the merits of the case. In fact, the Court was able to rule on the merits of this case after the bench trial, without any sanction issues impacting the ruling.

In this sanction opinion, though, the Court must consider what has transpired during the course of this case. After the conclusion of the bench trial, the Court's concerns mounted when Mr. Eaton made several misstatements of law and misrepresentations to the Court, which were the subject of the Court's show cause orders and which the Court will now address in detail.

On July 15, 2025, Mr. Eaton filed a response in opposition to the Defendant's motion for directed verdict. The Court noticed blatant discrepancies in his citations and began a review.

Defense counsel also noticed the issues but moved faster on the record than the Court did. Defendant filed a motion to strike the response and a motion for sanctions, noting several misrepresentations of the law and citations to cases that do not exist.

In light of the seriousness of the issues, the Court continued its independent search related to the citations at issue. Regarding the cases that allegedly do not exist, the Court's search revealed the same problems identified by Defendant in its motion and the allegations made by the Defendant were correct: the cases either do not exist, citations did not go to the referenced names, and/or the cases did not relate to the issues at hand. For the cases that relate to misrepresentations or false quotations, the search did not fare any better for defending the use of those citations in the manner and context given. Finally, the Court reviewed each citation provided by Mr. Eaton in the pleading at issue and found additional misstatements of the law not noted by Defendant. [Further details omitted. -EV] …

[W]henever the Court expresses issues with the timeliness of Mr. Eaton's filings, Mr. Eaton often blames an illness that he claims often prevents him from working. Mr. Eaton again, during trial held during the Summer of 2025, claimed that the same illness prevented him from being fully prepared to try this case that had been lingering since 2022. He claims his mysterious illness prevented him from properly demanding a jury, which resulted in this case being tried as a bench trial rather than a jury trial. He claims this illness prevented him from fully complying with discovery orders and from being able to efficiently question witnesses that he chose to call at trial—unnecessarily dragging out proceedings far beyond the number of days he stated he would need to try the case.

The Court concludes at this point that Mr. Eaton demonstrates an unwillingness or inability to meet the minimum standard of competence to practice law. He has demonstrated incompetence throughout these proceedings, which have ultimately culminated in numerous misrepresentations of the law, as outlined in this Court's previous show cause orders….

The Court … has no difficulty finding that Mr. Eaton's misconduct was more than mere recklessness. The Court notes that errors can happen in filings despite attorneys' (and even judges') best efforts. Yet the insertion of bogus citations and misrepresentation of authorities is not a mere typographical error, nor the subject of reasonable debate. It is just wrong. The Court tried, in two separate show cause orders, to bring Mr. Eaton's attention to the various issues with the authorities he cited. And, despite filing numerous responses, Mr. Eaton never fully addressed all of the Court's concerns or corrected all of the misrepresentations.

He further failed to participate in this process by showing up to the first show cause hearing entirely unprepared, and then repeatedly requesting continuances and creating excuses for why he was unable to attend future hearings. The Court finds that Mr. Eaton is either lying about his health situation or, if true, he is no longer capable of practicing trial law and should file for disability. Thus, the Court will impose an appropriate sanction under the various authorities the Court has at its disposal….

The court then concluded that Mr. Eaton should paid the defendants for their time spent dealing specifically with his "misstatements of law" (not the other misconduct that the court had discussed as part of the background of the case):

Defendant claims its attorneys expended a total of 218.9 hours of work in this matter, which includes 83.6 hours by Mr. Dunagan, 33.6 hours by Mr. Harrell, and 78.7 by Mr. Lawley, 1.1 hours by Ms. Wolf, 17.6 hours by Ms. Baker, and 4.3 hours by Ms. Oakes. The accounting of the attorney and paralegal work that was performed in this matter includes a description of the work performed, amount of time expended to perform the work, the date the work was performed, the hourly rate, and the total amount billed for the described work based on the hourly rate and time expended.

Each time entry provides a detailed description of the specific work that was performed, and there are no instances of block billing. While 218.9 hours may initially seem like a lot, the Court spent a similar amount of time addressing the various misstatements of law by Mr. Eaton between cite checking everything, drafting orders, and reviewing Mr. Eaton's responses to the show cause orders. Thus, the Court is acutely familiar with the amount of time it took to address this particular issue and finds that 218.9 hours is reasonable, as the Court staff similarly spent countless hours reviewing these matters….

Defendant requests an hourly rate of $205 for Mr. Dunagan and Mr. Harrell, $359 for Mr. Lawley, $190 for Ms. Wolf and Ms. Baker, and $110 for Ms. Oakes…. The Court finds the hourly rates that were charged are all reasonable. In fact, all of the rates charged in this matter are lower than the rates that this Court has more recently found to be reasonable….

The post $55K Sanctions Related in Part to AI-Hallucination-Filled Court Filings appeared first on Reason.com.

Sex Educators Say They're Being Harmed by Age Verification Laws

2026-04-06T17:06:16Z

"Oh, so you want kids to look at pornography?" That's the absurd accusation often thrown at people who oppose age verification mandates for online adult content. Opponents of these laws counter that actually this is about adult free speech: Grown-ups should be able to create, publish, and view constitutionally protected erotic content without undue burden or infringement on their privacy. And indeed, that's the message Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers put forth recently when vetoing an age verification law in his state.

But there's another important—if less prevalent—argument against the age verification laws sweeping so many states: They may ensnare way more than just pornography. Enacted as regulations of any content "harmful to minors," these could be used against sex educators, sexual health organizations, reproductive freedom groups, sex worker rights advocates, transgender rights advocates, and queer creators of all sorts.

"If you let them ban porn, they will call you pornographic when they ban you," Bluesky user @ghostingdani.bsky.social posted recently. Replace "ban" with "put special, burdensome regulations on," and the same applies here.

A new poll from the Woodhull Freedom Foundation hints at some of the unintended consequences (or, some might speculate, intended albeit unspoken consequences) of these age verification mandates. In March, the sexual freedom advocacy group conducted a national survey "of sex educators and other sexual health professionals" to see how age verification laws aimed at adult content were affecting them.

This was a small initial survey, with just 56 respondents, so do not take this as the final word on anything. But nearly a fifth of the sex educators surveyed (18 percent)—and a third of those working in states with age verification laws in effect—said these mandates had already impacted their work in some way. The vast majority of sex educators (76 percent) and a majority of sexual health professionals (53 percent) said they were concerned about what these laws would do down the road.

Hopefully we'll find out more on the subject soon. "Woodhull plans to expand the survey's reach this spring to better understand how different populations and practices are being affected by these laws," the group said in a press release.

It's an urgently needed inquiry. Around half of U.S. states have now passed rules requiring that sexually oriented web platforms to check IDs or engage in some other form of state-approved age verification.

The copycat popularity of these mandates makes Evers' veto in Wisconsin extra-surprising (and admirable). Evers refused to sign an age verification bill (A.B. 105) for online, sexually oriented material on privacy and free speech grounds.

"I am vetoing this bill in its entirety because I object to the bill's intrusion into the personal privacy of Wisconsin residents," Evers wrote in his veto message. "While I agree that we should protect children from harmful material, this bill imposes an intrusive burden on adults who are trying to access constitutionally protected materials."

The governor pointed out that the "sensitive, personally identifiable information" websites would have to collect under this bill could be sold to the government or "intercepted by or transmitted to a third party and used as the basis for blackmail or identity theft."

In the News: More Charges for Penis Protester

Throwing the book at an inflatable penis: Renea Gamble protested against President Donald Trump in an inflatable penis costume last fall and got arrested for it. Authorities in Fairhope, Alaska, charged Gamble with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. "In Fairhope and around the country, many people were outraged at the cops' manhandling of a grandmother in her 60s. But it also seemed obvious that the case would go away once cooler heads prevailed," writes Liliana Segura at The Intercept. Not so:

Instead, the city of Fairhope doubled down. Rather than dropping the case, the city attorney slapped Gamble with additional charges earlier this year: disturbing the peace and giving a false name to law enforcement. Her trial, first set to take place months ago, has been delayed multiple times. It is now set for April 15….

To Gamble, who has turned down media requests while her prosecution is pending, the case is about much more than her individual rights.

"What Renea has been saying all along is that it's not so much about her," said [Gamble's lawyer, David] Gespass. "It's the Constitution and the First Amendment that are on trial."

On Substack

It's Komodo dragons all the way down: In a new Silver Bulletin post titled "Social media is turning into a freak show," Nate Silver shares the following chart, displaying X's most-engaged-with accounts:

Silver Bulletin

"There's a principle in ecology known as the island effect," Silver comments, where "in an isolated environment, strange things tend to happen":

There are all sorts of weird mutations that might not be survivable in a more competitive environment that can actually become fitness advantages on an island. Big animals tend to get smaller, and small animals tend to get bigger—like the Komodo dragon, whose range is limited to a few isolated islands in Indonesia.

That's basically what Twitter looks like now, "only with Catturd and the Gavin Newsom Press Office accounts locked in combat instead of a couple of (cute?) lizards."

Read This Thread

Indicators of Major Psychiatric Problems Didn't Improve After Youth Gender-Transition Treatment In Finland—They Rosehttps://t.co/sCoefigLeN
The study, which was based on comprehensive nationalized health data and included control groups, calls into question the claim that such… pic.twitter.com/ET0QboibSF

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) April 5, 2026

Ryan's thread delves into the new findings as well as sharing some criticism of them.

More Sex & Tech News

Love to see people using vibe coding tech to build tools to fight back against the government. For months, lone vibe coder Rafael Concepcion has obsessively built tools to counter the federal immigration crackdown—pivoting as he's been outmatched.

— Taylor Lorenz (@taylorlorenz.bsky.social) 2026-04-05T18:13:58.344Z

• In Missouri, a judge could decline to finalize a divorce if the woman was pregnant. House Bill 1908, which just passed both houses of the state's legislature, aims to change this.

• Was "millennial feminism" responsible for "hookup culture"? No, suggests Cartoons Hate Her. (There's a bunch I disagree with in this post, but I think the general idea that "hookup culture" was not some sort of feminist plot is probably correct…)

• Do tech companies own digital data, or do their users? This is one of the questions at the heart of an upcoming Supreme Court case—Chatrie v. United States—in which justices will consider the constitutionality of "geofence warrants."

• Sigh: People are now applying the "addiction" framework to AI agents.

No they are not. Can we stop with sloppy moral panic claims just once?

— Chris Ferguson ???????????????????????????? (@CJFerguson1111) April 5, 2026

• "The owner of two Scottsdale gentlemen's clubs has filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Scottsdale and its police department, accusing investigators of conducting an improper and damaging probe into allegations that customers were drugged," according to 12 News Phoenix.

The post Sex Educators Say They're Being Harmed by Age Verification Laws appeared first on Reason.com.

Ro Khanna: Congress Has Surrendered on War

2026-04-06T14:24:31Z

Today's guest is Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), a self-styled "progressive capitalist" who represents such major Silicon Valley cities as San Jose, Santa Clara, and Cupertino in Congress but who also supported the independent Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders for president. He has shown an increasingly rare willingness to work across the aisle, cosponsored with the libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) a war powers resolution aimed at President Donald Trump's bombing of Iran. He also joined forces with the Massie last fall to push disclosure of the Epstein files.

In this interview, Nick Gillespie talks with the five-term congressman about the need for Congress to reassert its control over the initiation of military force. They also discuss whether high taxes and regulations are why California was one of just five states to lose population last year. They argue the merits of California's proposed wealth tax that some say pushed Steven Spielberg, Mark Zuckerberg, the founders of Google, and other ultra-wealthy people to leave the Golden State.

They also discuss the role of government in spurring and regulating AI and other technologies, the meaning of the Epstein files, and whether the United States can redefine itself in a way that reduces polarization without reducing pluralism.

0:00–What is the biggest problem with the Iran War?
3:00–Did Trump start the Iran War to distract from domestic policy?
4:36–What should Congress do about the Iran War?
6:59–What is progressive capitalism?
9:10–Does Khanna support the proposed California wealth tax?
12:23–Are taxes and regulations causing California's population loss?
19:21–The role of environmental policy in California housing
21:03–Do billionaires weaken democracy?
24:19–The track record of wealth taxes
25:50–Will federal spending ever be reduced?
27:47–Artificial intelligence and impacts on the labor force
33:09–Assessing the New Deal
40:54–Is there a need for a national purpose?
46:24–The next attorney general and the Epstein files
51:19–What defines us as Americans?

Reason is hiring! Check out the two open roles on the video team now:https://reason.org/jobs/associate-producer/https://reason.org/jobs/producer/

Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Hello everybody. This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie, and my guest today is Ro Khanna. He's a representative, a Democrat from California, who represents Silicon Valley cities like San Jose, Santa Clara, and Cupertino. He's known for working across the aisle with people like libertarian Republican Thomas Massie. They cosponsored legislation to force a vote on the Iran war, as well as pushing to release the Epstein files. And Rep. Khanna calls himself a progressive capitalist, and he's a big Bernie Sanders fan. We're going to talk about that and what we have as common ground and where there might be some issues about that. So, Ro Khanna, thank you for talking to Reason.

Ro Khanna: Appreciate it. Thank you for having me on.

Let's start with the Iran war. You've been outspoken against the Iran war. As I mentioned, you co-sponsored a War Powers Resolution, a call for a resolution about Iran, with Thomas Massie. What is the biggest problem you see with the Iran war as it's being prosecuted?

It's both a moral and a strategic blunder. It's a strategic blunder for two reasons. First, we're not making America any safer. We have replaced Khamenei with his son, Khamenei Jr. Khamenei at least had a fatwa against nuclear weapons. Khamenei Jr. does not. If we replaced Khamenei Jr. by assassinating him, we would have the IRGC, the military, which is even more hard-line. They oppose the JCPOA. And at this point, Iran has leverage with the bombing in the Strait of Hormuz. When we stop bombing, which we should, along with Israel and Iran, we've actually given Iran more leverage in any deal that's going to come from it. So that's a…

It's kind of amazing that somehow we start this war and then the Strait of Hormuz is gatekeepered in a way that it had never been before. Not going well. You said recently Trump should just declare victory and get out. Do you think realistically there is any chance of that?

Yes, because he keeps going back and forth. I think Trump instinctively understands the American people don't want a long, drawn-out war. Unfortunately, today we had a plane shot down. One of the people was rescued. We're still waiting to see what happened to the second service member. We've seen 13 casualties already. Seven thousand of our troops are at risk. We've seen gas prices explode. Trump gets the risks, but he's got other people in his ear saying that he can somehow destroy the Iranian regime and bring about a new regime. And he's been, you know, made a terrible decision. But my hope is he can understand and recognize the longer we escalate, the more risk there is to the country and to his own legacy.

You mentioned people whispering in his ear. Two kinds of questions related to that. Why do you think Trump started the Iran war when he did? If you look back at somebody like Bill Clinton, to take a Democratic president, he bombed Kenya and Afghanistan. He bombed Kosovo when domestic politics got very messy for him. And it was very uncomfortable to witness that. Trump seems to respond to—when something is going bad for him in one place, he starts something new. Do you think Trump started the Iran war to take the focus off domestic policy failings?

It has taken the focus off of Epstein. I mean, the search results are down, but I don't believe that is the only reason. He, in my view, saw the Maduro capture and a more client leader coming there. I was opposed to that, but he saw that as a success and they thought, "Well, I can do this around the world." Of course, there've been three famous great American presidents, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. People said, "Wow, they all won wars, so what are you going to do, Donald Trump, to have your military glory?" I mean, the State of the Union was all about the regalia of military achievement. So I believe that he's been talked into saying, "Well, you're going to be the one who gets rid of bad guys around the world." He thought it was simpler than it is, given what he did with Soleimani in his first term and Maduro, and has made a mistake of hubris.

What can Congress do, or what should Congress do? This is something that is beyond partisanship. The president has been dictating foreign policy and when wars start and kind of when they stop for decades now. Is there anything that Congress can or should be doing that it is not?

First, we should be showing up. I don't mean this rhetorically, but we're in one of the major wars that we've been in in many years. And the Congress is out for two weeks. Like, I'm not saying that members of Congress are having a vacation. Some of them are doing district work.

Well, some of them are vacationing, right? We saw those horrific images of Lindsey Graham at Disney World, for instance.

And Lindsey has been the biggest cheerleader of the war. But even if they're working in their districts or doing things, I mean, don't you think that when we're engaged in a war where Americans are dying and where the president is saying, "I want 400 billion more dollars," that we should be every day debating that from the House floor? That we should be voting on War Powers Resolutions?

Is that a failure of Speaker Johnson, essentially?

Yes, but he's not the only one. We've had these speakers, candidly, who've given up an assertion of our authority. One of the things that Massie and I, when we succeeded with the Epstein Transparency Act, is we were relentless. People could have said, "Oh, they're going to ignore a discharge petition. Oh, Donald Trump will ignore you. They'll never sign the law." But we said, "No, we're going to speak about this night and day and we're going to push it." If you have an executive branch, which is taking maximalist power when it comes to war and peace, and we've seen this obviously with Trump, but we've seen this, as you alluded to, with other presidents, Democrats and Republicans, and you have a Congress which is basically silent, then who's going to win that fight? Obviously the executive branch. We haven't seen Congress stand up and say, "No, we're going to push back" in a meaningful, assertive way, where then you really have a conflict between two branches. And that's why the Federalist Papers aren't working, is because we've got a pliant branch of government on war and peace, because many members of Congress are fine not having to deal with these complicated, controversial issues.

But you guys, you've got a lot to do, right? You've got to get reelected. So, you know, we all have different priorities. Let's talk about an area that I find very fascinating about you. You call yourself a progressive capitalist. What do you mean by that?

I mean that I believe in entrepreneurship, I believe in markets, but I don't believe in unfettered capital going wherever it wants. For too long, we've had capital basically dictating to the state with deregulation and allowing for the free flow of capital.

Before we get to the progressive part of this equation, who are some of your favorite capitalists? Because I want to talk to you about kind of tax policy and your take on tariffs and things like that. But, you know, are there capitalists who are—you're like, "These are the people we need more of"? You know, who are your favorite businessmen or women heroes?

Well, Bill Knudsen, he came in FDR's government and basically helped industrialize America to win World War II, off the top of my head. That's one person. But, you know, Warren Buffett is someone who has talked about having more fairness for billionaires and having economic development—I mean, there are other people. Andy Grove is someone who talked about….

Intel. Long-time head of Intel, yeah.

You know, David Packard and Bill Hewlett were people who built HP, but had a sense of ethics, of contributing back to the…

Are there any billionaires today who fit that bill for you, you know, a kind of Hewlett-Packard model, or are they all…

I'm having a fireside chat with Jensen Huang of NVIDIA. I don't want to put him on a pedestal, not knowing all his views, but certainly he's, for example, said that, "Well, if I have to pay a tax, a billionaire tax, so be it." And he is really focused on how do we make sure that the economic development in this country is more even. I'm not saying he's a saint, but he's in a direction, I think, more of economic development and building an economy that works for everyone.

So you've come out in favor of a billionaire tax, you know, generally, and you've worked to introduce things. You've said recently, if Bernie Sanders were 15 years younger, he'd be the next president of the United States…

I believe that.

Yeah, and that kind of encapsulates the progressive element of this. Let's talk about billionaire taxes. I have read kind of differing, or I have a surmise of your view, on the proposed ballot initiative in your home state of California for a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires. That would be retroactive. Do you support that initiative?

I support the idea of a one-time 5 percent tax to pay for health care and to pay for child care. I've had issues which I'm hoping get clarified, which is that it should not be a tax on founders' voting shares and it should not tax illiquid assets of paper billionaires.

It shouldn't be on unrealized gains, basically.

Well, it could still be on a— I don't want to, you know, if you had public stock, for example, that still may be a tax on unrealized gains. But I'm talking about people who have totally illiquid assets and some startup that's valued at a billion dollars, but really haven't—could go down the other day. And—

How do you feel about the retroactive nature of the tax? This seems also kind of, it's a little bit different than usual, that if it passes in California in the fall, it would tax all of 2026. Is that good constitutional lawmaking or is that problematic?

Well, it's retroactive just to the first of the year. I think that was to disincentivize people leaving and exiting California. My view is that people who did it looked carefully at the law and thought that would be constitutional to do it within the year so people don't leave. But obviously, I assume people will challenge that. But I think at a federal level, it is much harder for folks to leave because we tax, as you know, by nationality, we don't tax by territory.

Yeah, for a long time it was the U.S. and Libya were the only two regimes that did that, and now it's kind of just the U.S. So it's not a great club to be part of, Congressman. But so talking about people leaving California, billionaires leaving California, this is part of the problem, right? If you say, "Ok, we're going to start taxing billionaires," last fall Steven Spielberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, left California. Others did just over the threat of this. Are they wrong to leave California if you say, "You're a billionaire and we're just going to take more of your money because you can afford it?"

Yes, because we live in a democratic society and 99.9 percent of Americans can't just get up and leave if their city council or state governments pass laws that they don't like. They say, "Yeah, I'm part of a democratic society and I'll work to elect someone else or I'll live with the laws that we pass."

But California also last year was one of five states that actually lost people, and it started doing that for the first time in 2020, partly because of COVID deaths as well as people moving. But, you know, does tax and regulation policy in California, is that one of the reasons why California is losing people—not just, you know, Steven Spielberg?

No. I'll tell you why. And I'm trying to give a fair critique and assessment of California. My district is producing 25 percent of the wealth of the country. We have $20 trillion in my district. It is the heart of the AI revolution. We're going to produce more wealth over the next five years than any place in human history. The argument that somehow California is having an exodus of wealth generation is just contradicted by…

No, no, but it is having an exodus of people. It's working-class people, middle-class people.

Yes. But that's not because our policies aren't good enough for entrepreneurship or our policies aren't enough for innovation or wealth generation. That's because we've had bad housing policy in California. We have not been building enough housing. We've had too much NIMBYism. And so the cost of housing is much higher than the cost of housing in other parts of the country. That's a genuine issue in California. We have had not sufficient investment in our public schools after Prop. 13 and have not had an education system that has delivered results like New Jersey or Massachusetts or other places and that's…

New Jersey schools are not—I'm wearing a Rutgers T-shirt, I grew up in New Jersey—their schools are not delivering for anybody except for teachers and bureaucrats, I must say…

But they're number one. Massachusetts and New Jersey are number one in student achievement…

But California— Well, not to get bogged down in per-pupil spending in California and things like that, but you're saying that the billionaire class, like, you can hold it captive in California. And I know I've listened to you talk about how, you know, if you're in Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley people are not going to go anywhere. The companies are not going to go anywhere because there's benefits to being in that place near each other, competing and sharing and all of that. But the fact remains, places like Texas and Florida are gaining people by leaps and bounds, and they're moving from places like New York state, where I'm talking to you from, and California.

Is this an optical illusion?

Yes!

A state like California will be able to keep more people by taxing people even more? California is like the number one most highest-tax state in the country, or it's always in the top three.

Not for working- and middle-class families. But you know, this idea— I've been hearing about Miami becoming the next Silicon Valley for 10 years. And Austin, it's a joke compared to Silicon Valley. It's 1/37th of the venture capital. They don't have the ecosystem of Stanford and of Berkeley…

Well, what about Hollywood? Hollywood is dying. They're doing everything they can to try and bring productions back there because it is too expensive to shoot movies in Hollywood. So Silicon Valley is a newer industry. Maybe that'll happen 50 years down the road. But what I'm saying is, I mean, you're saying that the California model—and I'd say California and New York, they share similar models of governance, where it's like, "We're going to tax a lot, we're going to regulate a lot, and we're also going to, at least on paper, offer high levels of services." Texas and Florida—and they're distinct from each other, as are New York and California—but they're like, "We're gonna tax and regulate less and we are also going to offer less." But then when you look at what Florida offers in higher education, it's actually available to people and it's great in a way that the UC system, arguably the best public university system in the country, it is like, you know, nobody can get in anymore. People leave partly because of that.

The UC system has produced results so much better than almost any place in the country.

Yeah, but it's an elite— I mean, you know, why hasn't UC created more campuses?

We should. We should be investing in that.

But what I'm getting at is…

That could be something that taxing the billionaires…

You're not, you don't see anything in the current kind of ecosystem where California and New York are losing population to Florida and Texas, and that doesn't make you think twice about a high-tax, high-service model.

Because of the fact that Florida is not producing nearly the wealth or innovation of California to make it think twice. I mean, there's a reason no one in the world knows what's happening in Austin or Miami and everyone knows Silicon Valley and that we're leading the United…

I don't know. I worry for you. You know, that you're saying like nobody knows that, but it's like those states—Texas, every year Texas—that when Texas is going to become more populous than California grows closer.

And people in California are like, no. The wealth gap and generation between Silicon Valley and Miami and Austin has leaps and bounds grown over the last couple of years because of the AI revolution. What builds wealth is not marginal tax policy. It's whether you have a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship and building new companies. I've literally got $5 trillion companies in my 50-mile radius in my district. How many trillion-dollar companies are in Florida?

Yeah, I don't know.

Zero. How many are in Texas? Zero. Zero.

And then you've got at least one in Arkansas, right? Probably with Walmart…

But I don't even think Walmart is a trillion-dollar company. So now, does California have problems? Yes. The problem is on housing policy. There are people leaving California because they want to go for cheaper housing. And does California have a problem in terms of not having high enough wages? Yes, we need to have higher wages. We need to have child…

California also routinely has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, it's always above the national average, and you're saying basically if we say the minimum wage, instead of it being $7 or whatever it is at the federal level, we're going to make it $20 or $30, that's going to make people stay in California, or is that going to make jobs that much harder to get?

Well, I believe that we need a living wage, we need child care, we need health care, but we also need to have federal investment, state investment in new jobs. And then if we had a housing boom, because we didn't have restricted zoning, we would create many more jobs.

What's the role of environmentalist policy? And this is interesting. And I enjoy this conversation. I'm not trying to, like, you know, do gotchas or anything. Florida and California are interesting in that Florida has—and this certainly started under Jeb Bush and other Republicans—they have a strong conservationist streak because the environment there is just kind of precarious. So it's not like they don't care about the environment. But is California's real strict statewide environmental review systems, etc., is that what kind of energizes the lack of housing development or the lack of development of new property that people can actually live on or work at?

We had made it too difficult in some places to get permitting, and we've reformed that because the environmental legislation was being abused by people who had nothing to do with the environment to try to slow down building. And we just passed, the governor signed, a reform on permitting on CEQA, which was a reasonable reform that we needed. But there are other issues. The rich people don't want to have their aesthetics ruined. They don't want people moving into their communities who are lower income. I mean, I think if you want to critique California, critiquing the housing policy is fair, critiquing the education policy in terms of our not having delivered enough is fair, critiquing the high cost of living in terms of lower- and middle-class families is fair. But the critique that we're not producing enough billionaires or wealth is just factually false.

Well, actually, though, I mean, in a way, if I can say this politely, I think your fixation on billionaires gets things wrong. I mean, if you look at post-tax-and-transfer income in America, inequality stabilized a couple of decades ago, according to the work of Scott Winship and other demographers. So it's, you know, fixating on billionaires. Like, I'm not poor because Jeff Bezos has a thousand times more income than me.

Well, but I think…

It's really it's about where are people in that, you know, the thick part of the income distribution

Well, I disagree with that for two reasons. One, and we understood this, I think, in the Gilded Age, that there was a correlation between wealth and power. The fact that people have this kind of wealth and they can put $300 million into super packs is a problem for a democracy. That when you have the top 19 billionaires controlling 12.5 percent of the GDP, $3 trillion, three times the wealth concentration of the Gilded Age. When they're using that to buy up companies and platforms and exert political power, that diminishes our equal voice in democracy. And that's why I believe that wealth inequality of this extreme is not helpful for a democratic project.

How do you fight that, then, as the congressman from Silicon Valley? And that, you know, accurately, that's how you define yourself, and you have megacorporations in your district. How do you withstand the pressure to dance to the tune that you're essentially saying that billionaires are calling?

Because there are enough engineers and vice presidents and leaders and even some billionaires who understand that the social contract is broken, who understand if you do good in America, you need to do good for America, and support my call for a new social contract in this country where we celebrate the creation of wealth and entrepreneurship. But we ask, of those billionaires, their help to fund health care, child care, a Marshall Plan for America…

So according to the Tax Foundation, which is a pro-market but generally well-regarded organization, the top 1 percent of income earners in America pay about 40 percent of the income tax, and they capture about 26 percent of the wealth in America. How much more of the federal government should the top 1 percent pay for if 40 percent isn't enough?

But the problem is that a lot of this wealth is never being taxed because they're in stock, folks never pay tax on it, they hold it til they die, they borrow against it, and then their heirs inherit it with a step-up in basis. So I'm talking, not about the tax on income, I'm talking about the tax on all of this capital. Which isn't being taxed, and it's not the 1 percent, we're talking about the 0.00001 percent.

You know, since about 1960, about 14 European countries tried wealth taxes. All but three of them repealed them because they found them unwieldy or counterproductive. Does that give you pause at all in saying, "What we need now is a wealth tax?" Even as we spend $7 trillion as a federal government, California's state budget goes up. Virtually every state budget goes up every year. So we're spending more and more, but we're getting less and less results. And is the answer to that, say we've got to squeeze billionaires more, because when we spend this much more, then we'll finally be able to achieve state capacity on delivering…

Well, first of all, I don't believe that we're getting less and less results. I mean, President Obama's Affordable Care Act got 20, 30 million people health insurance who never had that. Saved many, many lives. The fact that we had infrastructure projects under President Biden, the fact that we had investment in solar and energy and wind and geothermal was deeply important. Do I think there's waste and fraud in government? Absolutely. That's why Burchett and I have proposed audits to make sure that the government spending isn't wasteful. But the reality is there are too many people who don't have health care, we don't have child care. Instead of spending $400 billion on these wars in Iran, I'd rather keep up with college, I'd rather do child care, $10 a day. I'd rather have an economic bill of rights…

I would love to see the war spending just stopped and reduced. I mean, we're spending like $7 trillion a year in the federal budget, and this was unimaginable even seven years ago when things were in the $4 trillion range. Do you see any way in which that spending comes down? Or is it just we're going to keep spending more and more and more and then we'll figure out how to pay for it?

The Pentagon budget is 56 percent of all discretionary spending. We should reduce…

But the big-ticket items are so secure. And I agree with you, it's insane, but Social Security, Medicare, interest on the debt, and defense spending are the giant ones.

So that's one of the big—scrapping the cap on Social Security taxes would make that solvent in a huge way, meaning if after $170,000 you should pay your Social Security tax. Mitt Romney proposed…

But that's not the 1 percent either. I mean, that's, you know, if you are like two college graduates who have been working for 25 years, you're probably making that as a household. So that typically attacks not on the super-rich, but on the upper middle class, right?

I would do it after $400,000, but yes, you'd capture a fair amount of people who are upper-middle-class professionals with that. But I think people would be fine with that to secure Social Security and make sure we can increase Social Security benefits. And then I would go on taxing the ultrawealthy, and then I would get rid of some of the Medicare Advantage fraud. That's been a huge drain on our—

That is an insane policy, right? Medicare Advantage plans, that the government will pay more for them, and it just doesn't make any sense—if you have single-payer health care, why you would allow that?

Can I ask, you've said some things interesting about AI and the way AI innovation needs to be respectful of the people driving it—and this is in your district—the people driving AI need to be respectful of the possibility of dislocation, mass dislocation of employment and whatnot. What does that look like? You've talked about how workers need to have a say in how this stuff develops, around policy around it. What does that mean?

Well, let's take a very concrete case where you have autonomous vehicles used in public transport, and the building trades and transportation unions work with some of the cities. And they said, "OK, if you want to add autonomous vehicles, it can't displace the existing fleet, and you need to make sure that our members are going to have a job, whether it's dispatch or maintenance, and we're going to do the maintenance here domestically, we're not going to offshore it." And they came up with agreements to have autonomous vehicles added. So they weren't sort of saying no to technology, but very concrete commitments for their members to get jobs and to be part of that future. And what I'm saying is that's the kind of model we need as technology is adopted.

I mean, that can get out of hand, though. And I was thinking as I was talking about this, my father worked for SeaLand, which is a shipping company that is now owned by, I think, CSX or something. But they pioneered containerized shipping. The big fight that they ultimately had while they were rolling out this technology—which everybody says is one of the major reasons why the post–World War II world is richer than it was—is because of containerized shipping. It reduced costs of shipping goods, limited spoilage, all sorts of things. But they had to take on the longshoremen's union, which still exists in a much beggared form. But if the longshoremen had been able to direct the development of that technology, it never would have happened. I mean, the automobile industry might not have happened, etc. So how do you make sure—and this, I guess, goes back to your progressive-capitalist idea—how do you make sure that you're not strangling innovation by, you know, saying, "OK, well, nobody can ever lose a job. Nobody can ever be displaced by technology," which is going to benefit everybody in the medium or long run?

Well, it's a balance. It's saying that we can find jobs for the longshoremen on the containers. I mean, we could have figured out—no one's saying stop the technology. We're saying make sure those longshoremen have jobs, make sure as you're developing automobiles that people have jobs as mechanics, as car drivers, as doing things, and have that bargaining and not a complete ban on technology development. I guess the question in my view is, is the central problem in America a lack of efficiency, or is the central problem in America a lack of social cohesion? And of course you want both. You want efficiency and cohesion. But I would argue that the central problem in this country is a lack of cohesion, that the working class has gotten shafted. That people have not had jobs because of offshoring and the hollowing out of communities because of globalization and automation. And that we should be cautious in doing things that are going to exacerbate that as opposed to making sure that the AI revolution works for all of us. That's not to say "Stop the technology." I'm not one calling for a moratorium on the technology.

Doesn't Bernie Sanders tend toward that? I mean, you know, he seems to be very Luddite in technology. He also tends to be very anti-immigrant. I worry about that.

No, I would reject that characterization. I mean, Bernie has campaigned on a multiracial, multiethnic democracy. That was every one of his speeches and his campaign ads. And he just sat down with a lot of the technology leaders in Silicon Valley. I mean, he understands the technology. He wants to make sure that the technology works for ordinary Americans. But I certainly don't support, you know, what Elon Musk was for just a year ago, which was, let's just have a pause on AI development. I believe that there are uses for AI development and mRNA. We could develop the RNA genome. We could figure out cures for rare diseases. But when we are adopting it, we have to make sure we don't just displace millions of blue-collar workers. I mean, if there's anything that we should have learned in our politics, even for those who are more pro-market than I am, it is that the massive displacement of people in the working middle class causes angry populism that poses the greatest threat to the rule of law and to capitalism itself.

Let me ask, as a final question—

Let me ask you one question. How do you assess FDR's New Deal, a positive at this time or a negative?

I actually think that FDR—and there's a guy down at UCLA, an economist named Lee Ohanian, who I find very convincing—that most of FDR's interventions actually extended the Great Depression and that there are at least two Great Depressions. And also that the Depression did not end with the mega-buildup of the economy during World War II, but after, when government spending, federal spending, fell precipitously right after. I think the bold, if I may, the bold, persistent innovation or intervention that he talked about—experimentation—it made it very difficult for businesses to restart. And if you look at the economic data, I'm thinking of something like Amity Shlaes' book The Forgotten Man, unemployment and business starts went sideways for a long time. I think having simple rules and having a social safety net for people who need it is good. But I don't think that FDR was, ultimately, the New Deal was not what we are taught. I think it actually—

But if you look at just the data on unemployment, when FDR takes over, it's about 25–27 percent. It falls to about 18 percent because of the New Deal. And then he goes with the Works Progress Administration because of the '36–'37 recession, where it falls a little bit more. But it's undisputed that in '41, '42, '43, it falls to like 4 percent because of the war.

Yeah, but it's also, you know, first off I don't want war to be the health of the state, you know, broadly, even though I support, you know, obviously we should have fought in World War II. My father actually literally fought in World War II.

No, no, I'm not…

No, no, no, I get that. The government can direct the economy and goose economic growth for some period of time, but that gets problematic. And when you look at what life was like when the federal government was controlling most of the economy, there was rationing on everything. People were not necessarily doing better. That came after the war, when the government actually reduced its year-over-year spending. It's massive. We reduced our debt, we reduced our spending, and the economy roared back to life for a lot of reasons, most of which I think have to do with the federal government getting out of the way rather than…

The industrial base was built, but I think it's an interesting—the reason I ask that is because, of course, I have an admiration for FDR, with the caveat that it excluded the Black South.

Oh, and the Japanese internment is horrifying—

Yes. Of course. But I think that is a fair sort of insight into where our worldviews may differ, both in American politics, where FDR sees himself as saving capitalism from itself, and you see him as having overreached.

Well, yeah, and I agree with you. One of the things that I think people on the right and the left who are not populists—and I'm certainly not, and I don't think you are—thinking about where…and you know there are left-wing and right-wing versions of populism. And where do they come from? And they come from moments of dislocation where large numbers of people, or substantial numbers of people, feel left out. Trump called back to FDR in 2016 when he said, "I'm speaking for the forgotten man."

We need to make sure that people understand that they're connected and that there's a society where they have a place and something to connect them. I tend to think most of the time freer markets—not absolute anarchy or whatever—deliver better for people than larger and larger numbers of state controls on capital, on tariffs, on immigration, on things like that. And that the dislocations in industries tend to be slower and more digestible than we think. When we talk about industrial workers, which Trump won't stop talking about, the industrial percentage of the labor force peaked during World War II, and it's been kind of a straight-line decline since then. Long before globalization. And you learn how America got richer over that time. More people moved into houses, more people went to college, more people had more stuff. So we can digest and we can handle economic creative destruction, I think.

We can handle it on a macro sense, but I think what Trump's election twice showed is that there was a great anger that we didn't anticipate, of a loss of pride. And, you know, I do describe myself as an economic populist, but I don't think economic populism needs to be hostile to immigrants or hostile to a role in the world or hostile to technology. And this is what I'm trying to reconcile with progressive capitalism and FDR, putting aside the internment camps, which is a big….

But you also did mention the South. This is part of the thing—A number of analyses show this about…more money went to the places that voted for him in larger numbers. So I worry about political control of largesse.

Yeah, I think that's a fair concern. I mean, obviously, we have to—you know, it's funny, because at first when the Public Works Administration came, Ickes was a great champion on integrity, and it was the Hoover Dam, and of course that largely people think was a good project. And then by the time the '36–'37 recession happened, you get FDR saying, "Well, I don't care about all of the constraints," and you have the Works Progress Administration that hires 3.8 million people. But the word boondoggle comes out of that, because it's hiring people who may not be doing the most productive work. But overall, I guess I assess FDR as having really saved capitalism. And I believe you need a kind of moment like that that's more inclusive. I mean, that's…

Well, I also, to be honest too, we're not in that moment now. And one of the things that is amazing to me is really—this is an odd thing to be saying, because this has been a hell of a century, right? But, you know, we've gone through 9/11, we've gone through the financial crisis, we've gone through COVID and things like that. Median household income is higher than it's ever been. We're actually doing pretty well, even though we've had a ton of stuff thrown at us.

Certainly we're not in a Great Depression with a collapse of demand in the same way. And yet the sentiment among Americans is that we're not. And I don't think it's just driven by envy. I mean, I don't think it's, "Ok, that Jeff Bezos is making all this money and I see him on Instagram and so I'm not doing well." I think there's a real sense that people feel anxious about not having a $35 job and being able to buy housing and child care.

I agree with you that there is a lot of anger. And then how much of it is driven by actual material circumstances and how much of it is driven by narratives that take advantage of that? I think a huge part of it—you are about to turn 50, right? So you are part of Gen Z, or Gen X rather. Correct?

Yeah, we've been the skipped generation.

Whereas millennials and Gen Z, who are very pessimistic, feel like they are, in many ways, they are doing better than anybody. When you look at the number of Gen Z people at the same age as their parents, more of them own houses than 25-year-olds did 50 years ago, but they feel cheated and robbed by everything. And I think that's not a material issue, that is a narrative issue. And I think one of the biggest problems—I'm the grandchild of immigrants. I know you are the child of immigrants, am I correct?

Yes.

That era when you could talk about America being a nation of immigrants, and that helped create a sense of belonging and community, that's been over for a long time. The common identity of Americans as "we are not the Soviet Union," that's over. We don't have an overarching national identity that helps us see where we are in relation to our peers. And I think that's a huge issue. And I don't know where the fix for that comes from, but I doubt it is from billionaire taxes, to be quite honest, or more industrial policy on the part of the state.

Well, I agree with the central theme, which is that we're missing a common national purpose and we're desperate and hungry for leaders who will ask us to be bigger and to come together. And one thing I would argue is that a vision of economic renewal could be that. Now, we can disagree about how much of a role the state will play in that, but certainly we could agree that whether it's business leaders, technology leaders, labor leaders, faith leaders, that someone can summon the American people to help rebuild communities that have been left out, to help create economic pathways for those left out, and can make it a national call. And then, you know, if you're more libertarian, like Thomas Massie, he may rely more on the private sector. And if you have more faith in the role of the state, I may rely more on initiatives with state collaboration. But the point is we're missing a common national purpose.

Right. Well, and also if I may—and then I have a final question for you, that you mentioned, and Massie brings up—I think it's important also to recognize that a national purpose does not mean that we are trying to make people fit into a singular vision of America as the greatest nation on Earth. I'm not saying you are, but that people—

I do think America is the greatest nation of the Earth, but I don't think we have to have a thick conception of the common good. But we do need a conception of an allegiance to some sense of common mission. Even, you know, I think even this Artemis launch, which has some finally feel-good stories there. But, you know, there are only Americans who've landed on the moon, the 12 Americans who actually walked on the moon. And it's Americans again who are now going, 50 years later, not to land on the moon, but circle the moon. And I do think things like that matter. And we've been missing moments like that.

Well, another Bay Area denizen is Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, as well as The WELL in San Francisco and the Long Now Foundation. He is somebody who I think is worth thinking about in these terms, of where you build a common vision that's kind of opt-in but is transcendent, and it allows for diversity of individuals but also a kind of commonality of belonging or purpose. And that can be great. Because when I think back to my grandparents who left Ireland and Italy, and they were leaving other people's ideas of like, "Ok, this is your role in our great story of some kind of national purpose." It's something that we need to address because people do feel alienated from one another in a way that, I agree with you, it leads to political polarization and populism. And I think very little good comes out of populism, to be quite honest.

Well, I think the populism that recognizes the anger against systems that aren't working is a necessity. But if it's just that, without a positive vision, then I think it can feed into cynicism and nihilism. So it's a concept that—

Let me ask you…

And this Epstein [unintelligible] is an example of, I would argue populism, in terms of standing up against a group of people who raped or abused these young girls. One could argue that that is, in essence, standing up against bad guys in a system, is populist.

I was going to ask, I guess, two questions. One, with Pam Bondi out, you know, what happened as attorney general— What happens to the Epstein files? Because there's still like half of the files have not been released yet, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think Congress should make that a prerequisite, the Senate for confirmation, that you're going to release the rest of the files and you're going to make sure that we have investigations, and a future attorney general has to make those commitments. And if they lie in those confirmation hearings, they will be held accountable, just like Pam Bondi was. This is an issue that too many Americans care about, including Trump's voters. So it's a time for a great reset to get the rest of the files out.

In the Epstein saga, on the most kind of baroque level, people talk about a kind of global ring of pedophiles who are well-placed in business and universities and governments, are kind of running the world as their own pleasure palace. Does that go too far? Or what ultimately is the essence of the Epstein files saga, which has had an incredible hold on the public imagination?

I think it's a look at the recklessness, immaturity, venality, and callowness of our modern elite class. Not all of them, but that they were seduced by networks and power. And some of them participated in the abuse and rape of young girls, who thought the rules didn't apply to them. And others were so enamored by being part of this network of the privileged that they turned a blind eye to women and young girls being treated as dispensable. And so this culture that was created of impunity, a culture that people of decency could get caught up in. I don't think that everyone who went to Epstein's island was evil or a bad person, but how did we create this culture of an elite group that felt apart from the country?

And it goes to what we were talking about earlier, that there's sort of different lived experiences for Americans. It used to be, you know, when I was growing up on Amsterdam Avenue in Bucks County, my father was an engineer, my mom a schoolteacher. We were middle class on our street. We had an electrician and a track technician, a nurse. We had a vice president at a big company, and that person had the pool and we would go to the pool, but we all were on the same Little League teams and went to the sports games and the Phillies, and you had a shared common experience. And now I feel like that's missing. And this Epstein class highlights a type of experience that most Americans can't relate to and don't understand. If you're in a small town and you have an affair, it's not like human nature is perfect, but there's a sense of shame. There's a sense of, "What is the church gonna think? What's my neighbor gonna think?" And here you have, you know, obviously the abuse of girls. But even behavior that may not go as far as abuse, but just one that is totally shameless.

How do you restore that and, you know, that sense of a kind of multiclass common experience? And, you know, if we had more time, I would probably pick nits about, you know, your experience, which I'm sure was much better than many people in the greater Philadelphia area or in Pennsylvania. But how do you bring something like that back? Because I don't think it's going—one, it's not going to be easy…it's not going to be by taxing Steven Spielberg 5 percent. Right?

Well, I think it goes to the sense of how do we create a common sense of purpose again in this country, and an experience where we're dealing with other folks. I mean, one of the places I'm thinking about is called for Work for America, where if you're a young person, the federal government will help hire you whether you want to work for a company, whether you want to work in local communities, whether you want to come for the federal government, and you're doing things with other people in a common way. But, you know, I think this is the big question—I mean, some of it is housing policy, right, restrictive zoning. Some of that is a sense of basic health care and child care. But I don't think it's just material, and I think you're fair to point out that it's not just material, it's not just government. There is a sense of speaking to the American experience and identity. We have to be inspired again.

Can I ask, and this is hard to put you on the spot like this, but what is that flexible identity matrix that defines us as Americans? Because we're all going to have different, ultimately different experiences, and we're never— I have a background in American literature, and for years Americanists were always saying, "Oh, America was the first classless society." That's just wrong. I mean, we always have had and always will have different classes, but that doesn't need to get in the way of having a shared sense of purpose. What is it for you? What defines the American essence?

The idea is that our country is going to be the first cohesive, multiracial democracy in the history of the world. That you can come from Ireland, you can come from India, you can come from Italy, you could come from anywhere you want, and that the country will give you the chance - based on your hard work and your own initiative - to live out your dreams. To live the kind of life that you want to live, and that there's been no society in the history of humanity that has actually achieved that, to give everyone the shot to live out their dreams, exude their own genius, as opposed to just the genius of founders in Silicon Valley or kings, but every person to live their own genius and potential, regardless of their race and background and class. And that is the most grand civilizational achievement that should motivate us.

Do you worry that, you know, I mean, that kind of identity politics as practiced, particularly in the Democratic Party, and now there's a kind of white identity politics that is kind of growing among Republicans, but that's one of the problems, right? Is that we have to start thinking about individuals again, rather than everybody as a marker for whatever group we assign onto?

I think that at our best, our leaders, even who have talked explicitly about race, like Frederick Douglass, enslaved for 20 years, have talked about a composite nation. A nation where we ultimately transcend that in allowing people, despite their background, to have the basics. I believe that I got a lot from this country. I mean, I was able to go to a good public school, I didn't have to worry about health care. I had a wonderful childhood as a middle-class son of immigrants, and I just wish at least that for everyone. I think I have too many loans for higher education, but can we do that? And I grew up in a 97% white community in Bucks County, and yeah, there were times I was teased, etc., but overall, I remember a community that really embraced me.

How do we build that kind of positive vision? It doesn't mean that we say to people who argue, "Well, race matters because of disadvantage, class matters because of disadvantage," it doesn't mean we shut their voices out, but we say to them, "That is not determinative of the American story. That is an input, and the North Star is still being a composite nation." But that isn't the final diagnosis or end aspiration of America. The end aspiration is to transcend it, but with the honesty to acknowledge it.

You know what, I think that's a wonderful note to end on. Thank you, Rep. Ro Khanna, California's 17th District, Silicon Valley. Thank you so much for talking to Reason.

Well, I enjoyed the conversation.

Producer: Paul Alexander
Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

The post Ro Khanna: Congress Has Surrendered on War appeared first on Reason.com.

'I Am Blowing Up Everything'

2026-04-06T14:11:15Z

'Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards.' President Donald Trump's chaotic handling of the Iran War took a profane and bizarre turn on Sunday.

Source: TruthSocial

Separately, Trump told reporters that he continues to negotiate with Iranian officials in advance of the Tuesday deadline. "There is a good chance, but if they don't make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there," Trump told Axios. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump said Iran would "lose every power plant" in Tuesday's strikes.

This renewed rhetorical push to get Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz comes just a few days after Trump seemed to downplay the Hormuz situation in a scripted address on Wednesday night. At the time, Trump said the strait would "just open up naturally" (though he did also promise to hit Iran "extremely hard" for two weeks).

The Trump administration's demands, threats, and deadlines have been a moving target throughout the war. Even so, following through on this latest threat to destroy Iranian power plants and bridges would be a war crime under the Geneva Convention and other international agreements that prohibit the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure. A strike on Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant could also cause a "severe radiological accident," the International Atomic Energy Agency warned.

Hey, wasn't this war supposed to be saving the Iranian people from their awful authoritarian government? We seem to have slid pretty quickly into "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it" territory.

As the war enters its sixth week, at least two things are clear. First, the entire conflict underlines why the Founders required presidents to go to Congress before waging war. This war is deeply unpopular, its goals remain vague at best, and there is still no solid evidence that Iran posed an immediate threat to America (the supposed justification for not getting congressional permission upfront).

If Trump had followed the Constitution and asked Congress to sign off before this war began, what would probably have happened? The Strait of Hormuz would be open, gas prices would not be over $4, schools and universities in Iran would not have been bombed, and the dozens of Americans who were killed or wounded in our timeline would still be alive and well.

Second, there is no exit strategy. On Monday morning, Iranian leaders reportedly rejected a proposed 45-day ceasefire. Trump's plan of posting through it has not yet produced results, and any further escalation would likely expand and extend the conflict—one that Trump claimed on Wednesday would be wrapped up in just two more weeks.

Artemis update: The first manned mission to the Moon in more than five decades will arrive at its objective today.

A NASA livestream of the lunar flyby will begin at 1 p.m. ET. A little less than an hour later, the crew will have traveled farther from Earth than any other human beings in history—surpassing the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. The planned orbit of the Moon will last throughout the rest of the afternoon and evening. If all goes well, the astronauts will be on their way home by the end of the day.

Go here for a full rundown of today's schedule of events, including some of what the Artemis crew will be seeing.

Scenes from D.C.: Taxpayers from across the country will have the privilege of spending $10 billion on beautification projects in Washington, D.C., one of the wealthiest places in America.

"The planned Presidential Capital Stewardship Program would be overseen by the National Park Service," The Washington Post reports. The spending is proposed as part of Trump's budget for fiscal year 2027, which begins on October 1. The administration is calling the plan a "generational investment" that will generate economic development and increase tourism.

It's a really strange form of populism that believes more money needs to be spent in D.C.

And as a fan of our national parks—I spent a few hours on Saturday climbing Pass Mountain in Shenandoah—I'm also disgruntled by the idea of spending $10 billion fixing up D.C. when the National Park Service is facing an estimated $22 billion maintenance backlog. All the more reason to privatize the parks, so they can secure more stable funding and won't have to keep competing with Trump's stupid vanity projects!

QUICK HITS

The middle class is shrinking—because Americans are getting wealthier. In 2024, about 31 percent of Americans were part of the upper middle class, an increase from just 10 percent in 1979.
The federal immigration officials who shot and injured Julio C. Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant, claimed they had been attacked and beaten by Sosa-Celis and his housemate. Video evidence of the incident tells a different story. Why does this keep happening? (Because federal agents keep being reckless and then lying about it.)
California's $20 minimum wage for fast food workers "raised wages in the sector by roughly 8 percent relative to the rest of the country" but killed about 18,000 jobs in the process, reports Alex Tabarrok on the findings of two recent papers covering the economic fallout of the change.
Higher tariffs have created economic uncertainty, torched America's credibility in global markets, and imposed costs at home.
Federal immigration officials arrested and detained 22-year-old Annie Ramos, a college student with no criminal record, just days after she married a U.S. Army staff sergeant.
Taxpayers in Jacksonville, Florida, will spend $775 million—the largest single expense in the city's history—upgrading a stadium that was built in the 1990s for just $121 million ($263 million in today's dollars).

The post 'I Am Blowing Up Everything' appeared first on Reason.com.

In One Day (Mar. 31), 17 U.S. Court Decisions Noting Suspected AI Hallucinations in Court Filings

2026-04-05T22:28:50Z

So reports Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases Database. And recall that likely (1) many hallucinations aren't spotted; (2) many that are spotted aren't noted in court decisions; and (3) the great majority of court decisions are in state trial courts, and thus aren't posted on Westlaw or Lexis or any other place where Charlotin and others can easily spot them.

The post In One Day (Mar. 31), 17 U.S. Court Decisions Noting Suspected AI Hallucinations in Court Filings appeared first on Reason.com.

Posts Such As "Every Ice Gestapo Needs Too Be Shot" May Be Constitutionally Unprotected True Threats

2026-04-05T00:11:27Z

From last week's decision in U.S. v. Murfin by Judge Gregory Frizzell (N.D. Okla.):

At various times from July to October, 2025, Mr. Murfin allegedly posted the following five statements on the social media platform, "X" (formerly known as Twitter) under the alias "Azulenq":

"Need too start shooting these 'just following orders' pigs. Ice agents are reenacting ww2 nazi germany and its not acceptable. Only good ice terrorist is buried 6 feet under.";

"Every ICE agent needs shot between the eyes 'just following orders' isn't acceptable and they already exposed they are human garbage.";

"Every Ice gestapo needs too be shot. 2nd amendment right too carry everyone should stay armed and when these terrorists come by just kill them. They dont deserve too live after 'just following orders' we aren't reliving ww2 germany. They dont want due process so show em.";

"but we as US citizens should be gunning down these domestic terrorists. All ice gestapo can not use the 'just following orders' excuse. If you're complicit in this act you've gotta be executed for this act."; and

"Yeah ICE agents need to get shot in a 3,959 mile radius no where safe for gestapo pigs."

Murfin was prosecuted under federal threat statutes, and the court allowed the case to proceed:

[The relevant statutes] "apply only to 'true threat[s]'—i.e., threats outside the protective scope of the First Amendment." "The Supreme Court in Virginia v. Black (2003) defined 'true threats' as 'statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.'" The speaker, however, "need not intend to actually act upon the threat." As the Tenth Circuit has explained:

It is not necessary to show that [Mr. Murfin] intended to carry out the threat, nor is it necessary to prove he had the apparent ability to carry out the threat. The question is whether those who hear or read the threat reasonably consider that an actual threat has been made. It is the making of the threat and not the intention to carry out the threat that violates the law.

U.S. v. Dillard (10th Cir. 2015). A true threat must be "a serious threat as distinguished from words as mere political argument, idle talk or just." … When analyzing a statement's language, the Tenth Circuit has "warned against 'rigid adherence to the literal meaning of a communication without regard to its reasonable connotations ….'" "A defendant cannot escape potential liability simply by using the passive voice or couching a threat in terms of 'someone' committing an act of violence, so long as a reasonable recipient could conclude, based on the language of the communication and the context in which it is delivered, that this was in fact a veiled threat of violence by the defendant …" Dillard.

Upon review of the indictment and the briefs submitted by the parties, the court concludes that a reasonable jury could construe Mr. Murfin's statements to be true threats—that they are statements where the speaker means to communicate serious expressions of intent to commit acts of unlawful violence to a group of individuals. Mr. Murfin targeted messages of deadly action at ICE agents generally: "Need too start shooting these 'just following orders' pigs …. Only good ice terrorist is buried 6 feet under."; "Every ICE agent needs shot between the eyes"; "Every Ice gestapo needs too be shot …. everyone should stay armed and when these terrorists come by just kill them."; "we as US citizens should be gunning down these domestic terrorists …. If you're complicit in this act you've gotta be executed for this act"; "ICE agents need to get shot." Mr. Murfin's statements are similar to those in Stevens and Tinoco, where the defendants also targeted messages of deadly action at a particular law enforcement officer or a group of law enforcement officers generally. U.S. v. Stevens (10th Cir. 2018) ("The psychotic pile of s--- who MURDERED the unarmed civilian who broke down is going to be executed …. unless the Prosecuter [sic] & the Judge deny bail, they too will be executed …. The Tulsa PD Chief is going to be killed …. EVERYONE on that list is going to start being killed. Cops, Prosecutors, Judges, family members …. If killing every last one of you … is what it takes to drive that point home, so be it …. Cops are going to be killed …. Betty is not going to get 3 yeas [sic] probation and a pension, she is getting a bullet through her brain."); U.S. v. Tinoco (10th Cir. 2018) (Mr. Tinoco said, "[i]f [the United States Border Patrol agents] were iron deficient, [Tinoco] had banana clips for [the agents], and [Tinoco] could give [the agents] iron and potassium"; "I'm going to have your head"; [l]et's have a shootout and end this right now …. I've been at shootouts before. I know what I'm doing"; and "I can be sure to come at your brain with a hammer drill as if I was searching for fucking gold").

Mr. Murfin cannot escape liability by couching the statements in terms of a "need" to shoot or execute ICE agents. A reasonable reader of Mr. Murfin's statements could conclude that the statements are "statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a … group of individuals." Furthermore, a reasonable jury could find the statements to constitute serious threats as distinguished from "mere political argument, idle talk, or jest." "[R]igid adherence to the literal meaning of a communication without regard to its reasonable connotations … would render the statute[s] powerless against the ingenuity of threateners who can instill in the victim's mind as clear an apprehension of impending injury by an implied menace as by a literal threat." …

With respect to statements posted on the Internet, the Circuit has noted:

Several attributes of the Internet substantially amplify the fear an individual can instill via threats or incitement. Such threats have the ability to reach a vast audience—far more than the traditional speaker or author published in a single venue. The threats may often come cloaked in anonymity, allowing authors to make menacing statements they would never consider making to an individual in person. And, given the prevalence and diversity of Internet fora and discussion boards, such exhortations may often find a receptive audience of like-minded individuals—perhaps audiences more willing to do the bidding of one urging violent action….

For these reasons, the court concludes that a reasonable jury could find that Mr. Murfin's statements constituted true threats….

Mr. Murfin also argues that the Indictment should be dismissed with prejudice because plaintiff cannot plausibly make out a cognizable claim that his statements constitute incitement to imminent lawlessness or violence under Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). "Under Brandenburg v. Ohio [395 U.S. 444, 447 (1969)], incitement speech is unprotected only if it is 'directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.'" "But the line between threats and incitement, especially in cyberspace" is unclear "and no court has suggested that the categories of unprotected speech are completely distinct from one another." Speech such as Mr. Murfin's "fits squarely within the rationale for excluding true threats from First Amendment protection." Dillard ("Imminence may contribute to a finding that a communication constitutes a true threat, but it is not a required element.")….

For a similar recent decision, see the post See MAGA, Shoot MAGA" in TikTok Video Was Criminally Punishable Threat. For an older case along these lines, see U.S. v. Hussaini (S.D. Fla. 2022):

Mostafa Hussaini posted two videos on YouTube: in the first, he threatened to kill Christians by stabbing out their eyes with a knife; in the second, he promised to murder Black people by burning their bodies in a fire. After a concerned citizen brought the videos to law enforcement's attention, a grand jury in our District indicted Hussaini on two counts of violating 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), which prohibits the transmission, in interstate or foreign commerce, of "any communication containing … any threat to injure the person of another." …

[But i]t's … no surprise that the only federal circuit court of appeals to address [the] question … whether § 875(c) requires that the threat be directed at a specific individual or group … has squarely rejected Hussaini's position. See U.S. v. Cox (6th Cir. 1992) ("Cox would avoid responsibility under [§ 875(c)] by claiming that the alleged threat did not identify any specific person or group. We do not read the statute to be so limited, and Cox cites no cases that have placed this restrictive interpretation on the statute.")….

AUSA Stephen N. Scaife represents the government.

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Today in Supreme Court History: April 6, 1938

2025-07-09T21:23:47Z

4/6/1938: United States v. Carolene Products argued.

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As the Death Toll Rises in Trump's Immigration Crackdown, Support for ICE Shrinks

2026-03-24T20:16:08Z

The first year of President Donald Trump's mass deportation effort has been filled with rights violations. Unsurprisingly, that militant approach has had deadly consequences.

Out of public view, deaths in ICE custody hit a 20-year high in 2025. Thirty-two people died from varying causes, including heart failure, stroke, tuberculosis, and suicide. "In some cases, their families and lawyers have alleged, they died of neglect, after repeatedly trying and failing to get medical care," per The Guardian. Four migrants died in ICE custody in just the first 10 days of 2026, according to Reuters.

Those deaths come amid a speedy expansion in the number of people ICE detains. By the end of 2025, nearly 70,000 people were being detained by ICE—"a 78% increase from the number detained in mid-December 2024," according to the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). Despite the massive increase in the detained population, facility inspections fell by 36 percent, per POGO. In December, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) detailed medical neglect at a California detention center, claiming that detainees were denied cancer treatment, insulin, and wheelchairs. The ACLU and other immigrant rights groups reported in October that detained pregnant women were experiencing miscarriages and denied prenatal care while in custody.

From September through January, federal immigration agents shot 13 people, killing four, according to NBC News. Two of those deaths involved U.S. citizens in Minneapolis: An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed Renée Good and a Customs and Border Protection agent shot and killed Alex Pretti just weeks apart in January. In both cases, the agents resorted to violence in situations that could have been resolved peacefully. In September, agents fatally shot Mexican immigrant Silverio Villegas González during a traffic stop in Chicago, and in December, a Border Patrol agent fatally shot Isaias Sanchez Barboza, a Mexican citizen, in Rio Grande City, Texas. It took nearly a year—and a public records request—for federal officials to acknowledge that a Homeland Security Investigations officer had fatally shot U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez during a late-night traffic stop in March 2025.

America's immigration enforcement apparatus is dangerous in part because of the ways it flouts legal checks on its behavior. "ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence," wrote U.S. District Court Judge Patrick J. Schiltz in a January order.

But immigration enforcement has also proven deadly because violence is behind the very laws that ICE agents are enforcing. "All state laws ultimately rest on the threat of violent enforcement," Reason's Christian Britschgi wrote after Pretti's killing. When it comes to "the state's immigration restrictions," he continued, "the less popular they are, the more violence will be required to enforce them."

Six in 10 Americans now disapprove of how ICE is carrying out the immigration crackdown, according to a January PBS News/NPR/Marist poll. An even greater share—62 percent—believe that ICE's actions are leaving Americans less safe.

The post As the Death Toll Rises in Trump's Immigration Crackdown, Support for ICE Shrinks appeared first on Reason.com.

Brickbat: Must Report

2026-04-02T03:42:16Z

A recent investigation by the California Attorney General found that the El Monte Union High School District systematically failed to protect its students by ignoring and burying reports of sexual abuse by staff members for years. The inquiry, sparked by media reports and survivor testimony, revealed that district officials consistently mishandled up to 113 complaints of sexual harassment and assault. To resolve the investigation, the district agreed to a settlement that would place it under state control for at least four years and require major reforms, including a new centralized system for tracking misconduct and the appointment of an independent coordinator to oversee future complaints.

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Open Thread

2026-04-06T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

Today in Supreme Court History: April 5, 1982

2025-07-09T21:22:56Z

4/5/1982: Justice Abe Fortas dies.

Justice Abe Fortas

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Nationwide Injunctions, a Crucial Check on Presidential Power, Are Not Dead Yet

2026-03-24T20:25:22Z

You may have heard that the U.S. Supreme Court killed off the practice of nationwide injunctions, the practice where a federal judge stops a federal policy from going into effect everywhere in the country while a single lawsuit challenging that policy plays out in court.

As a result, you may think that President Donald Trump is now free to implement his national agenda of immigration crackdowns without facing any more interference from pesky lower court judges, who have enjoined such presidential policies in the past.

That was certainly how the White House characterized the Supreme Court's June 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, which lifted several nationwide injunctions against Trump's executive order purporting to abolish the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship for millions of U.S.-born children.

"Today's decision restores the proper separation of powers between the branches of government," declared White House Counsel David Warrington. "Ending nationwide injunctions is a tremendous victory for the American people and the rule of law."

But Warrington's statement did not exactly match the facts. It would have been more accurate to say that the Supreme Court limited the use of nationwide injunctions. And Warrington might have added that the Supreme Court left the courthouse doors wide open for federal judges to block the president's actions nationwide through other comparable legal mechanisms, such as national class-action lawsuits.

Here's how you know that Warrington missed the mark. Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship was reblocked from going into effect nationwide by a federal trial judge barely two weeks after the CASA decision came down, and it has remained so blocked ever since.

If nationwide injunctions are truly dead, then they or their likeness have an uncanny habit of climbing out of the grave daily to haunt the president.

'Power Belonging to Another'

Serial abusers of presidential power have typically raised the loudest complaints against the use of nationwide injunctions. Take Trump's predecessor, President Joe Biden.

Before the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to abolish nationwide injunctions in CASA, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to abolish nationwide injunctions in a case called Garland v. Texas Top Cop Shop (2025), which involved a legal challenge to the federal Corporate Transparency Act. "A court of equity may grant relief only to the parties before it," argued Biden's solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar. "The district court violated that principle by issuing a universal injunction purporting to enjoin the Act itself and forbidding the enforcement of the Act even against non-parties."

Perhaps the administration was still sore after its resounding 2023 loss in Biden v. Nebraska, in which the Supreme Court struck down Biden's plan to unilaterally cancel billions of dollars in federal student loan debt via executive action. That case, as you may recall, took off only because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against the president's plan.

As an authority for the debt cancellation, Biden had invoked the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act of 2003. According to President George W. Bush, who signed the HEROES Act into law, it "permits the Secretary of Education to waive or modify Federal student financial assistance program requirements to help students and their families or academic institutions affected by a war, other military operation, or national emergency." In other words, Biden argued that a law specifically designed to ease the student debt troubles of service members fighting the war on terror should also be read to allow him to pursue a separate and more far-reaching domestic policy of his own devising.

The Supreme Court rejected Biden's dubious theory of expansive executive action. "This is a case about one branch of government arrogating to itself power belonging to another," the majority observed. "It is the Executive seizing the power of the Legislature."

No president likes to lose in court. But the sorest losers may be those presidents who think they ought to possess the unilateral power to set national policy as they alone see fit. Perhaps that is why both Biden and Trump went gunning after nationwide injunctions. Overreaching executives tend to chafe when judges get in the way of their power grabs.

'Proper Legal Procedures'

Which brings us back to Trump and his executive order on birthright citizenship. Although the Supreme Court's CASA decision did tell the lower courts to dial back the use of nationwide injunctions, the Court also stated that other avenues of nationwide relief would still remain fully available.

For example, "in the wake of the Court's decision," Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed in concurrence, "plaintiffs who challenge the legality of a new federal statute or executive action and request preliminary injunctive relief may sometimes seek to proceed by class action…and ask a court to award preliminary classwide relief that may, for example, be statewide, regionwide, or even nationwide." And that national class-action approach, Kavanaugh added, was just fine under CASA. "Today's decision," he wrote, simply "will require district courts to follow proper legal procedures when awarding such relief."

Two weeks later, Judge Joseph Laplante of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire, an appointee of George W. Bush, took CASA at its word when he blocked Trump from enforcing the birthright citizenship order against "all current and future persons who are born on or after February 20, 2025," and whose parents are either unlawfully present in the U.S. or whose parents are temporary visitors to the U.S.

"Because enforcement of the Executive Order would likely constitute unlawful behavior towards the entire class" of such persons, Laplante held in "Barbara" v. Trump, "and because a single injunction and declaratory judgment would provide complete relief to every member of the class, the class fits comfortably" within the federal rules governing national class-action lawsuits.

There are important technical distinctions between a nationwide injunction and a national class-action. But there are also important similarities. The most important is that, in both instances, a federal policy may be blocked from going into effect nationwide while a single lawsuit against that policy plays out in court. Either way, in other words, Trump still faces a judicial ruling that bars him from carrying out his executive order anywhere in the United States.

What's Next?

After repeatedly losing in the lower courts, the Trump administration finally asked the Supreme Court in September to rule on the merits of Trump's birthright citizenship order. After sitting on the petition for nearly three months, the Court agreed in December to hear the case, which will be argued on April 1.

What will happen when the Supreme Court weighs the case, at last? It's possible that Trump will win and the justices will use the opportunity to restrict the use of national class-action lawsuits against presidential orders just as they limited the use of nationwide injunctions. That would be a big win for every power-hungry president going forward.

But the Supreme Court might also rule against Trump's order on the correct grounds that it violates the text, history, and original meaning of the Birthright Citizenship Clause. In so doing, the Court would not only strike a blow against Trump's unconstitutional stance. It would solidify the national class-action lawsuit as a handy tool to use against presidential overreach.

The post Nationwide Injunctions, a Crucial Check on Presidential Power, Are Not Dead Yet appeared first on Reason.com.

Open Thread

2026-04-05T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

Birthright Citizenship as a Second-Best Policy

2026-04-05T04:04:58Z

For a variety of reasons, I oppose Donald Trump's efforts to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and those in the US on temporary visas. And I have argued he deserves to lose the Supreme Court case on this issue. But unlike many other opponents of Trump's policy and of his constitutional arguments, I am not convinced birthright citizenship is the ideal system. It is, at most, only a second-best option, in the sense that it's better than the currently likely alternative.

Under current political conditions, that likely alternative is subjecting hundreds of thousands of children to deportation, and many adults, as well. Even though Trump's executive order is limited to children born at least 30 days after it was issued, the logic of his legal arguments would deprive millions of adults and older children of their right to live in the United States, as well. If the Fourteenth Amendment denies birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa-holders, that fact did not begin suddenly in 2025, but must have been true all along. Thus, the likely consequence of a legal victory for Trump would be grave harm to millions of children and descendants of immigrants, plus severe damage to the American economy and society from the resulting deportations and legal uncertainty. In addition, millions of other Americans would find it difficult to prove citizenship status if it can no longer be done on the basis of a birth certificate.

But while birthright citizenship is better than the likely alternative at this point in history, I do not believe it is the ideal policy. I explained some of the reasons why in a 2018 post:

Unlike most other advocates of immigration and immigrant rights, I have significant reservations about birthright citizenship. In my view, important human rights should not be so heavily dependent on parentage and place of birth. Our current citizenship system has all too much in common with medieval hereditary aristocracy, under which freedom of movement and other crucial rights were largely dependent on ancestry. I cannot outline anything like a comprehensive alternative here. But, as a general rule, I would prefer a system under which some rights now largely determined by citizenship (particularly freedom of movement, residency, and employment) were delinked from citizenship and made presumptively available to everyone, and citizenship itself were made easier to acquire through pathways that do not require the applicant to be a relative of a current citizen.

More generally, one of my (and many others') main objections to immigration restrictions is that they restrict people's liberty and opportunity based on arbitrary circumstances of ancestry and place of birth. If you were born to the right parents or in the right place, you get to live and work in the US; if not, you can only do so if the government gives you permission, which in the vast majority of cases is likely to be denied. In that respect, they are very similar to racial segregation and South African apartheid. In both cases, liberty is gravely restricted and many are consigned to a lifetime of poverty and oppression because of morally arbitrary circumstances of birth over which they have no control.

Birthright citizenship is an improvement, in this respect, over a policy based on ancestry and parentage. For many children, it creates an alternative pathway to get around unjust restrictions. But it still restricts liberty and opportunity based on circumstances of birth, in this case based on place of birth, as well as parentage. And people have no more control over the location of their birth than over the identity of their parents. Neither determines your moral worth or how much liberty you are entitled to.

Thus, the far superior policy is simply to let people live and work where they want, regardless of who their parents are or where they were born. If that liberty is to be restricted, it should be only if the people in question pose some grave danger that cannot be addressed in other ways. And, in such extreme situations, native-born people's liberty could potentially be restricted, as well. I develop these points in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 6 of my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

Obviously, under current circumstances, citizenship includes not only the right to live and work in the US, but also rights to vote, hold public office, and receive various welfare benefits. In an ideal system, restrictions on voting and office-holding would be based on competence and (in some cases) there might be exclusions based on a demonstrated danger to liberal democratic institutions (as with Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Supreme Court wrongly gutted, to a large extent). We already have some competence-based constraints on the franchise, such as excluding children, some convicts, and immigrants who cannot pass a civics test most native-born Americans would fail if they had to take it without studying.

Access to welfare benefits should, I believe, be much more severely limited than is currently the case for both immigrants and natives. But even now the vast majority of immigrants contribute more to the public fisc than they take out, and limiting the welfare state is a bad argument for immigration restrictions that - if applied consistently - would also justify severely restricting many other liberties.

Thus, the ideal political system would have a strong presumption against restrictions on migration, while also imposing competence-based constraints on voting rights and office-holding, and limiting welfare benefits in various ways. We need some combination of decoupling citizenship from freedom of movement, constraints on access to government power, and limiting welfare benefits to a class of people who genuinely cannot avoid severe privation without them. And none of these rights and privileges should be, to any great extent, based on parentage or place of birth.

But, obviously, there are serious questions about whether governments can draw these lines in the right places and be trusted not to abuse their powers. Elsewhere, I have argued that we probably cannot rely too much on competence-based restrictions on the franchise, because real-world governments generally cannot be trusted in this field. We should instead address the problem of voter ignorance and bias by other means. It is also obvious that we are not going to get anywhere close to full freedom of movement for migrants anytime soon.

For these kinds of reasons, I think birthright citizenship for all people born in the United States is the best available option at this time. That's especially true because it does not preclude creating and expanding other pathways to residency, work rights, and citizenship. But we should be under no illusion that it is anywhere close to ideal, and we should remember that it includes an important element of unjust discrimination based on arbitrary circumstances of birth.

In this case, as with other situations involving unjust discriminatory immigration restrictions, the right approach to arbitrary discrimination is to "level up" rather than "level down." We should not deny birthright citizenship to those who currently enjoy its benefits. But we should also do all we can to expand these opportunities to others.

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Today in Supreme Court History: April 4, 1861

2025-07-09T21:22:24Z

4/4/1861: Justice John McLean dies.

Justice John McLean

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The Labor Department Just Freed Contractors—Again. Congress Still Needs To Act.

2026-04-04T13:06:31Z

The debate over independent contractors is taking off again. In recent weeks, the Department of Labor issued its long-awaited independent contractor rule. The new directive reverses a Biden-era anti-contractor rule and thereby returns federal law to a more contractor-friendly posture. But as this federal regulatory seesaw plays out, state governments—and even Congress—provide the best hope for long-term change.

The debate over how to classify independent contractors dates far back in time. A 1947 U.S. Supreme Court case, Rutherford Food Corp. v. McComb, grappled with the issue of whether slaughterhouse workers were employees or contractors, and in the nearly 80 years since, the debate has never fully resolved. But in 2018, it received renewed attention in the aftermath of a decision by the California Supreme Court that created a new stringent three-part test that made it extremely difficult for workers to be classified as contractors.

This state court decision was eventually expanded through the now-notorious A.B. 5 law in California, which was a thinly-veiled attempt to prevent gig companies from classifying their drivers and deliverers as independent contractors. The argument in favor of worker reclassification is that independent contractors lack employment benefits such as health insurance, paid sick time, and more. California voters rejected the effort to reclassify gig workers as full-scale employees in a 2020 ballot referendum, but by that point independent contractor reclassification had already become a cause célèbre for the modern political left, with numerous states seeking to follow California's lead.

The Labor Department issued anti-contractor guidance during former President Barack Obama's second term, only to see the first iteration of the Trump administration issue a pro-contractor rulemaking at the very beginning of 2021. Once President Joe Biden took office shortly thereafter, the government suspended the Trump rule and eventually issued its own rulemaking that again had an anti-contractor bent. Now, to complete this bureaucratic whiplash, the Trump 2.0 Department of Labor suspended enforcement of the Biden-era rule last year and has issued a new proposed rule that essentially reinstates the Trump 1.0 rule.

The new rule concentrates on two key factors when it comes to determining whether a worker can be classified as an independent contractor under the Federal Labor Standards Act: first, the nature and degree of control over the work, and second, the worker's opportunity for profit or loss.

If a worker has substantial control over things like his or her work schedule, selection of projects, and ability to work for competitors, then this would lean toward a contractor-based rather than employee-based relationship. Likewise, if a worker has the opportunity to earn profits or incur losses based on his or her initiative (such as their business acumen and judgment), then this would again militate in favor of a contracting relationship. This type of pro-contractor legal standard would largely shield gig companies from federal attempts to reclassify their workers as full-scale employees.

The importance of maintaining independent contractor flexibility extends far beyond the gig context, too. Everyone from real estate agents to barbers have long operated under contracting models, and attempts to reclassify these workers as employees would create massive disruption across a broad swatch of industries.

One often overlooked example is financial advisors, many of which are independent contractors. Reclassifying them as employees could make these advisors less willing to work with lower-net-worth clients, which in turn would have underappreciated and widespread impacts on the potential retirement savings of millions of Americans

But while the latest rulemaking is sufficiently pro-contractor to protect against such negative impacts—at least at the federal level—it's worth noting that in our hyper-polarized era, it could well be reversed by subsequent administrations, just like its predecessor rules. The result is more uncertainty and paralysis for businesses and industries, which must endure a substantial rewriting of American labor law every four to eight years.

Fortunately, at the state level, more durable change is happening. Rather than trying to reclassify workers as employees, numerous states have begun experimenting with what's known as a portable benefits model. Under this framework, independent contractors in the gig economy are given access to SEP IRA–style accounts in which both they and gig companies can contribute. The funds from these accounts follow the contractors from job to job, rather than being tied to a single company, and they can be used for benefits like health insurance, retirement funds, or paid time off.

States as ideologically diverse as Pennsylvania, Utah, and Maryland have pursued this model in recent years, with more states set to join the ranks this year. The idea has even made its way to Congress in the Unlocking Benefits for Independent Workers Act that was introduced last year by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.).

The Department of Labor's new rule is a boon to independent contractors. But the real change is happening in the states. And, ultimately, it's up to Congress to step in any prevent this regulatory teeter-totter from becoming fully unhinged.

The post The Labor Department Just Freed Contractors—Again. Congress Still Needs To Act. appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump Realized He Can Just Do Things. Who Can Stop Him?

2026-03-24T20:21:39Z

Karl Marx said that when history repeats itself, we're supposed to get tragedy first, then farce. But Donald J. Trump has spent his life flouting all the rules. Why should we expect him to obey the historical dialectic?

In Trump's two presidencies, farce came first. From the jump, his first turn at the helm was a head-spinning spectacle. He talked like a caudillo crossbred with an insult comic and seemed like a strongman auditioning for the part. In practice, however, Trump proved something of a "low energy" authoritarian. Very few of 45's autocratic fancies—from unilaterally revoking birthright citizenship to"hereby order[ing]" American companies out of China—ever made the transition from tweet to law of the land.

Trump 1.0 arguably ended up a less imperial president than George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. Even on COVID-19—a workable excuse for an executive power grab if ever there was one—45 proved the rare president willing to let a good crisis go to waste.

Midway through Trump's shambolic first term,I warned in these pages that we should count ourselves lucky things hadn't gone worse, and should "set about reimposing limits on the office's powers before a competent authoritarian comes along."

I never imagined it would be the same guy. And yet it's Trump's second presidency that's delivered a mix of tragedy and genuine peril. Somehow, during the interregnum, Trump discovered you can just do things. In the process, he's revealed just how few meaningful constraints remain against one-man rule.

'Flood the Zone With Shit'

On day 1 of his first term, Trump issued only a single executive order. The Beltway freak-out over the new administration was largely about presidential style rather than policy substance. An NPR item—"Yes, All This Happened. Trump's First 2 Weeks As President"—captured the reigning zeitgeist. "All This" included some pro forma hand-wringing about actual policies, like the travel ban, but the real focus was Trump's lack of decorum: Look at this guy with his "alternative facts" about the crowd size at his inauguration! He made a travesty out of the National Prayer Breakfast! ("And I want to just pray for Arnold, if we can, for those [Celebrity Apprentice] ratings, OK,' the president said.") You can't take him anywhere!

In the reality-show arc, Trump 1.0 showed us what happens when the presidency stops being polite; Trump 2.0 was when it started getting real. On Day 1 of his second term, Trump came out of the gate with 26 executive orders. By the 100-day mark he'd issued 143—more than triple Biden's near-record-setting pace—while signing fewer bills into law than any first-year president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Everything everywhere all at once—or "flood the zone with shit," as Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon once put it. All told, it was an unmistakable inflection point: the moment our long slide toward pen-and-phone governance took a dizzying lurch downward.

Crank tweets from the first term became executive orders in the second. One purported to rewrite the 14th Amendment by eliminating birthright citizenship; another dusted off the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as authority for summary deportations and warrantless searches of homes.

In his first term, Trump sent the markets into a tailspin with an August 2019 tweet ("Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China"), following up with a statutory citation: "try looking at the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Case closed!" Nothing came of it until 2025, when Trump recovered the presidential pen and issued a series of directives using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to hike duties on Mexico, Canada, and China, purportedly for failure to stem fentanyl trafficking, and then to impose new tariffs worldwide—declaring the longstanding U.S. trade deficit a "national emergency."

In so doing, he converted the 50-year-old foreign-policy sanctions statute into his personal Oval Office "tariff button"—allowing him to launch trade wars from his desk as easily as ordering a Diet Coke.

Outside U.S. borders, Trump forged new frontiers in presidential warmaking. With a September 2025 airstrike against a suspected cartel boat off the coast of Venezuela, he took the war on drugs from metaphor to reality. In January, Trump followed up by sending Delta Force to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Then, in the early morning hours of February 28, Trump unleashed Operation Epic Fury—a huge, coordinated U.S.–Israeli air bombardment that hit more than 1,000 Iranian sites and killed key regime figures, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Like the rest of us, Congress learned about Epic Fury from a video on Trump's Truth Social account, in which the president warned Iranian fighters to "lay down your weapons [or] face certain death" and urged the Iranian public, "When we are finished, take over your government." Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule is another the president considers optional: You can just break things, no need to buy them.

No One Man Should Have All This Power

Some of these moves, like the president's IEEPA gambit, were genuinely new. But most of them tapped into a vast reservoir of power that presidents have always enjoyed—because we've let them.

The modern presidency comes preloaded with emergency powers, unilateral trade authority, administrative control over vast swaths of economic life, and the practical ability to wage war at will. If Trump has any claim to being a "transformational president," it's because his contempt for power-constraining norms has brought our dilemma into bold relief, revealing the dark possibilities the office has long contained.

Well before Trump came down that golden escalator in 2015, presidents enjoyed virtually unchecked power to wage war. The War Powers Resolution—passed over President Richard Nixon's veto in 1973—aimed to restore Congress' constitutional power to decide the question of war or peace, but it's barely inconvenienced any president in the five decades since. In our system, like it or not, one man decides.

Over the course of decades, Congress has handed the president a vast arsenal of statutory powers—more than 130, by the Brennan Center for Justice's count—that he can unlock by saying the magic words "national emergency." And yet, to date, nearly 70 percent of those powers have never been triggered.

The plain language of the Insurrection Act makes it shockingly easy for a president to put boots on the ground in American cities, using overt language of discretion (allowing military force "whenever the president considers" that unlawful assemblages "make it impracticable to enforce the laws"). Yet despite Trump's recent threats, it hasn't been triggered in over three decades.

Earlier this year, when asked whether anything meaningfully constrains his power, Trump told The New York Times: "Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me, and that's very good."

That's not terribly comforting. Is there anything else that can do the trick?

A Game of Chicken

In 1994, after market pressure forced the Clinton administration to dial back some of its more ambitious plans, James Carville cracked that if there's reincarnation, "I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."

If the president can't be constrained by law, maybe a Wall Street sell-off can pull him back from the brink. That's what many people have been banking on lately, and that bet comes with a cutesy acronym: TACO, for Trump Always Chickens Out. The coinage comes courtesy of Financial Times reporter Robert Armstrong, who in May 2025 posited that the administration "does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain"—a prediction that was borne out through Trump's repeated post–"Liberation Day" climbdowns from his most aggressive trade threats.

There's another TACO dynamic at play with public opinion: Plummeting polls occasionally force presidents to back down. Earlier this year, some 1,500 U.S. soldiers stood ready to join the federal surge into Minneapolis, The New York Times reported, "but the shooting death by immigration officers of a second U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti, on Jan. 24 galvanized public sentiment against the federal government's tactics and forced the administration to retreat."

Public opinion can stay the president's hand even where his powers are broadest. Since President Harry Truman got burned in Korea, no modern president has been stupid enough to risk a mass-casualty ground war without congressional authorization.

All of this is pretty cold comfort, however. Market discipline can occasionally force presidents into tactical retreats on a narrow suite of issues investors care about. Even there, it may have diminishing returns. "The TACO trade has proven a reliably winning one on Wall Street," the Los Angeles Times reported in January, but "if TACO means investors don't need to panic when Trump signals aggressive policy action after another, then there are no market collapses violent enough to spook him into backing down like he did on tariffs last year."

And while public backlash can sometimes compel presidents to stand down, that check has become steadily weaker. Modern presidents increasingly govern for the base. So long as he holds it, low-40s approval ratings overall seem not to have deterred Trump much.

We're Trapped in Here With Him

At best, these informal checks add up to some reason to think "surely he won't do anything crazy." They're no guarantee he won't wake up one morning thinking, if you want to take Greenland, take Greenland.

In fact, the TACO discourse is itself a stark reminder of just how bad we've got it. Trump's second presidency has made clear that American prosperity and domestic tranquility rest on a brittle foundation of presidential self-restraint—and now we're framing forbearance as cowardice.

Perversely, Trump's political opponents have been using the acronym as a taunt. In June, the Democratic National Committee parked a taco truck, featuring a picture of Trump in a chicken suit, on Capitol Hill. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) used the gibe in an apparent attempt to scuttle negotiations over Iran's nuclear program: "If TACO Trump is already folding on Iran, the American people need to know about it." As Jim Antle put it in The American Conservative, "It is exceedingly strange to try to bait someone you regard as a narcissistic madman into pursuing policies you dislike and consider dangerous to the country."

Especially when the man is so eminently baitable. That same week, Trump blew up at a CNBC reporter who referenced the acronym. "He's clearly super irritated by it," a Trump ally told Politico, adding that "it's like a challenge to his very manhood now." Armstrong now wishes he'd never coined the term: "If this gets into [Trump's] head and he digs in his heels," he lamented last year, "that is really a disaster for which I am very, very sorry." It's surreal to think somebody might provoke a trade crisis—or a war—just by whispering "bawk bawk" at a thin-skinned 79-year-old man, but here we are.

Always was always doing far too much work in the acronym. The president shouldn't have unilateral power to drag us into economic or military disaster in the first place. To ensure he doesn't, there's no substitute for formal checks from coordinate branches of government.

But Gorsuch?

Is the judiciary up to the task? Lately the courts have been doing a more than passable job living up to their assigned role as "bulwarks of a limited Constitution."

At the district-court level, Trump has suffered setbacks, some of them coming from judges he's appointed. In May 2025, the Supreme Court rebuffed his attempt to use the Alien Enemies Act for summary deportations; in February 2026, it rejected his attempt to convert IEEPA into an all-purpose trade-war weapon.

And yet historically, the Supremes have been much more effective at pulling recalcitrant states into line than picking fights with a "co-equal" branch. They tend to take that risk only when they're facing a weak president: ruling against an embattled Truman in the steel seizure case, yielding to a dominant FDR on Japanese internment.

And what Alexander Hamilton called "the least dangerous branch" offers no hope of restraining the president where he's most dangerous: his power to wage war. How could it? The president has the guns, while the courts have nothing but gavels. Meanwhile, Congress has the money and "all legislative power" granted by the Constitution. In order to check the president, we need it back in the game.

Don't (Just) Blame Congress

It's at this point that we're usually left delivering "a halftime pep-talk imploring [Congress] to pull up its socks and reclaim its rightful authority," as the legal scholar John Hart Ely once put it. We pay their salaries; why won't they do their jobs? Congress' long decline in public respect has roughly coincided with its total abdication of power and responsibility. Some years back, smart-aleck researchers at Public Policy Polling asked voters to rank Congress against a parade of maladies, and reported that, on the whole, Americans prefer witches, the IRS, and hemorrhoids to the federal legislature.

Congress has a terrible reputation, and it mostly deserves it. But its inability to check the president isn't entirely its fault. Look what happens when it tries.

In Trump's first term, Congress passed resolutions reversing arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, ending U.S. support for the Saudis' murderous war in Yemen, overturning the president's bogus border wall "emergency," and—after the drone strike assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani—restraining his ability to wage undeclared war on Iran. Trump nullified each of those measures with a stroke of his pen. Eight of the 10 vetoes that 45 issued during his first term beat back congressional attempts to reverse unilateral actions the majority opposed. The resolutions currently before the House and the Senate to cut off the illegal war with Iran face the same hurdle.

That's not the way it's supposed to work. The 1973 War Powers Resolution empowered Congress to halt hostilities via concurrent resolution; the National Emergencies Act of 1976 allowed Congress to terminate presidential emergencies at any time by majority vote. But thanks to a 1983 Supreme Court decision, a simple congressional majority isn't good enough anymore. Attempts to check presidential action, the Court held in INS v. Chadha, must themselves run the gauntlet of the ordinary legislative process, and be presented to the president for his signature or veto. Since the president can be expected to veto congressional attempts to restrain him, in practice it takes a veto-proof majority to undo what he's done—an even higher bar than impeaching and removing him from office.

The upshot is that wars and states of emergency are easy for the president to start and nearly impossible for Congress to stop. Chadha's effect was to flip the default setting of the American government toward one-man rule: The president proposes and the president disposes.

Even so, we don't lack for smart legislative proposals to shift it back. The path toward restoring congressional checks after Chadha is fairly straightforward: If we don't want the president to be able to unlock new statutory powers by declaring national emergencies, we can amend the National Emergencies Act so those powers quickly expire without affirmative approval from Congress. The REPUBLIC Act, which was introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and passed out of committee in the last Congress, would have zeroed out unapproved emergency declarations in 30 days and barred the use of IEEPA as a trade-war weapon. Other recent measures apply the same approve-or-expire framework to presidentially imposed trade restrictions and to domestic troop deployments under the Insurrection Act. The 2021 National Security Powers Act put forward by Sens. Mike Lee (R–Utah), Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), and Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) would give the War Powers Resolution teeth by linking presidential compliance to power of the purse, and automatically terminating funding for unauthorized military operations.

Of course, each of these reforms would also have to either win the president's signature or garner enough support to make it past his veto. Deimperializing the presidency is a manageable task in terms of legislative design; as a political matter, it's a dauntingly heavy lift.

The System, Man

That lift would be well worth the strain, because the dangers that Trump's reckless second presidency has revealed won't recede when he goes back up that escalator.

In 1944, Friedrich Hayek chastised "socialists of all parties" for embracing the comforting delusion that "it is not the system which we need fear, but the danger that it might be run by bad men." So too with our power-swollen presidency. Through multiple administrations I've made the case that our real problem is the office, not the man. Still, sometimes it's both/and.

It's true: We have a very bad man in the presidency. But an overwhelming focus on Trump's enormities, the view that he's sui generis, risks encouraging the comforting delusion that maybe we can wait him out. We can't.

Relimiting the presidency will take a large-scale reform effort that seems nearly unthinkable now. Yet as Jack Goldsmith wrote last year: "the consequential 1970s post-Vietnam, post-Watergate reforms of the presidency were unfathomable just a few years before they occurred. A reckoning after Trump 2.0—or after the retaliation it provokes—could mirror the 1970s moment and offer a chance to constrain the presidency and to restore congressional primacy."

Still, we should be clear-eyed about what getting to that constitutional moment might require. Last time around, it took Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the Church Committee's revelations of mass domestic spying for America to hit the rock bottom that we needed to hit to admit we had a problem. The bad news is things may have to get a lot worse before America is ready for that reckoning.

The post Trump Realized He Can Just Do Things. Who Can Stop Him? appeared first on Reason.com.

Open Thread

2026-04-04T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

Accusing Someone Who Called Police of "Blatant Racial Profiling" May Be Defamation

2026-04-04T01:27:35Z

A short excerpt from an opinion by Judge Rebecca Pennell (E.D. Wash.) Wednesday n Riera v. Central Wash. Univ.:

Mr. Riera was employed in a fixed term, non-tenure track faculty at Central Washington University (CWU)…. On the morning of April 1, [2024,] Mr. Riera called the CWU police to report an older, "apparently homeless," woman wandering around Samuelson Hall. He said he wanted to make a report "before things get … out of control." An officer reported to Samuelson Hall and confirmed the identity of the woman as a CWU professor. No further action was taken by campus police or Mr. Riera.

The CWU professor shared her experience with two colleagues. The colleagues immediately filed bias complaints with CWU, alleging the target of Mr. Riera's call—a Black woman—had been the victim of racial profiling.

This led to a great deal of institutional response, including a discussion at a faculty senate meeting. Defendant Erdman, "a lecturer at CWU and member of the faculty senate, emailed unofficial minutes [of the meeting] to non-tenured faculty," and her notes included this:

Welcome to the Deep South, Circa 1935

Without naming names or describing the incident, [CWU President] Wohlpart expressed his outrage at a recent unconscionable incident on campus.

From my own knowledge, I think I can tell you the basics: It was an incident of blatant racial profiling. Campus police were called because a person of color was sitting quietly in the lobby of a CWU building for a brief interval. The person turned out to be a highly distinguished faculty member—but was compelled to produce and show ID before being left in peace.

(I must remark that this is outrageous on multiple levels. All CWU buildings are public; they belong to the State of Washington and its people. Anyone may sit in the lobby of any of our buildings. There was no reason at all to call the police—except, I guess, that this was a person of color.)

Wohlpart called the incident "unacceptable" and said that Central is working to see to it that such a thing doesn't happen again on our campus….

Riera sued Erdman, among others, and the court allowed his defamation claim to go forward in part:

[M]ost of [Erdman's] statements cannot be characterized as false. The only exception is Defendant Erdman's statement that what happened on April 1 "was an incident of blatant racial profiling." A jury could conclude this statement falsely asserts that the person who called police on April 1 engaged in intentional racial profiling. And, given widely-shared public records revealed Mr. Riera as the caller, a jury could also conclude Defendant Erdman's statement was about Mr. Riera.

Defendants argue that regardless of truth or falsity, Defendant Erdman's statement cannot be considered defamatory because it falls under the common interest privilege. "The common interest privilege applies with the declarant and the recipient have a common interest in the subject matter of the communication." The privilege applies to "persons involved in the same organization, partnerships, associations, or enterprises who are communicating on matters of common interest." Examples include officers of a nonprofit association or partners to a partnership. The privilege arises "when parties need to speak freely and openly about subjects of common organizational or pecuniary interest." …

If the privilege exists, it can be lost in two circumstances (1) if the speaker is not acting in the ordinary course of their work or (2) the speaker's statement was made with actual malice; i.e., reckless disregard for the truth. Whether the privilege has been lost under either scenario is a question of fact.

Here, the parties appear to agree that members of CWU's faculty senate are members of the same organization who share a common interest. The dispute lies in whether an exception applies.

The Court concludes there are issues of fact regarding whether Defendant Erdman's statements fell outside the scope of the privilege. Going to the first exception, Defendant Erdman had no official responsibility for taking notes at faculty meetings and she was not required to share her notes with other members of the senate faculty. A jury could therefore conclude that her statements were outside the ordinary course of her work as a member of a senate. With respect to the second exception, Defendant Erdman was not a witness to the April 1 incident and no investigation had yet taken place. A jury could therefore conclude Defendant Erdman was reckless in asserting that the call to CWU police was an act of blatant racial profiling…. [T]he allegations against Defendant Erdman raise questions of fact that must be resolved by a jury.

The post Accusing Someone Who Called Police of "Blatant Racial Profiling" May Be Defamation appeared first on Reason.com.

The U.K. Is Set To Spend $183 Billion on Pensions This Year. Nigel Farage Vows To Keep Hiking Payments.

2026-04-03T21:56:49Z

The U.K. will spend nearly 138 billion pounds ($183 billion) on retiree benefits this year, more than its entire education or defense budgets. Despite the eye-watering cost, British politicians are pledging to keep funding it.

On Thursday, Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage announced that his party, should it win the next election, would maintain the funding mechanism for the country's state pension program, known as the "triple lock." Under this system, the state pension rises every year at the same rate as inflation, average wages, or 2.5 percent, whichever is highest. Thanks to a 4.8 percent increase in average wages from May to July 2025, this year's state pension payments will rise by more than $60 per month, beginning in April. The Office for Budget Responsibility expects that by 2030, the triple lock will have added 15.5 billion pounds annually to the cost of the state pension program.

Government pensions are a scam.

Younger workers are paying more and more to fund a system that is mathematically impossible to sustain.

Would you scrap the triple lock? pic.twitter.com/2uwa6cSYn2

— Reem Ibrahim (@ReemAmirIbrahim) April 3, 2026

Like U.S. Social Security, the state pension is an unfunded pay-as-you-go system, where the contributions collected from today's workers are used to pay today's retirees. The U.K.'s aging population, coupled with collapsing birth rates and shrinking labor markets, has resulted in fewer workers paying into the system, leading to higher taxes to fund increasingly expensive pensions.

What's more, 25 percent of these pensioners are millionaires. As the Intergenerational Foundation found in 2022, more than 3 million people over the age of 65 live in households with property and pensions worth more than 1 million pounds (about $1.3 million). Fifty-three percent of this population lives in households with over half a million pounds in assets (roughly $661,000), and the number of older people living in households with total wealth above 1 million pounds rose by 269 percent from 2010 to 2020.

Gold-plated pensions make little financial sense, but they make a lot of sense politically. According to YouGov, 42 percent of Brits think the triple lock "definitely should" be maintained. Another 23 percent think it "probably should" be kept. The program's favorability is likely to improve as more older people vote and politicians rush to please this demographic. (In the 2024 UK general election, people over 55 years old made up the majority of voters in most constituencies.)

But just because something is politically popular doesn't mean the government should keep funding it, especially given the state of the U.K.'s public finances. In 2024–25, public sector net borrowing was more than 153 billion pounds ($198 billion), a whopping 5.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and debt interest payments alone cost taxpayers an additional 110 billion pounds ($132 billion) a year. The Office for Budget Responsibility expects that if policy does not change, the fiscal challenges posed by an aging society would push borrowing above 20 percent and debt above 270 percent of GDP by the 2070s.

In a 2025 report, the Adam Smith Institute estimated that the state pension system will become "financially unsustainable by 2035," at which point "the state will be spending more on welfare payouts, the greatest proportion of which is the State Pension," than it receives. The same report offers a series of recommendations to fix the impending pension crisis, including ending monthly benefits to those with pensions of more than 1 million pounds and reforming the triple lock to a double lock that does not consider inflation in payment hikes.

Unfortunately for working-age Brits, it does not appear that policymakers are heeding such advice. Rather than reforming the broken system, politicians seem intent on keeping it.

The post The U.K. Is Set To Spend $183 Billion on Pensions This Year. Nigel Farage Vows To Keep Hiking Payments. appeared first on Reason.com.

Short Circuit: An inexhaustive weekly compendium of rulings from the federal courts of appeal

2026-04-03T18:55:09Z

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.

The day draws near for IJ's upcoming conference "The Other Declarations of 1776." As part of the nationwide celebration of 250 Years of America, we're partnering with the Liberty & Law Center at Scalia Law School for an examination of the various declarations of rights that the new states adopted in 1776. It's Friday, April 10 in Arlington, Va. You can still register here! And, if you want to learn more about those Other Declarations in the meantime, check out our series of blog posts, covering Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and, new this week, North Carolina.

New on the Short Circuit podcast: A certification request from the Eleventh Circuit to the Alabama Supreme Court radicalized IJ's Mike Greenberg into Erie abolitionism.

If you like comparing the EPA to the DMV then you'll love how the D.C. Circuit disapproved of the feds delegating endangered species compliance to the state of Florida. Well, you'll love the lead opinion. The concurrence only joins in part and takes issue with the DMV hypo while the dissent bequeaths an "in-the-weeds discussion of various overlapping environmental laws."
Sometimes you can tell the ~~clerk~~ judge had a fun time writing an opinion. Such as this First Circuit decision. A sample of the literature: "Meet the Ponzo brothers, Chris and Joe . . . How the Ponzos became crooks and what they want from us is kind of a long story. But here's the short version . . . Life was good for the millionaire brothers. But the government eventually caught on."
From the annals of "litigation takes a long time": Eleven American families filed suit in 2004 against the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority for the Second Intifada terror attacks in Israel. In 2015, a jury sides with the families and they're awarded $655 mil. Second Circuit (2016): Federal courts lack personal jurisdiction over the Palestinian groups for these claims. Congress (2018): Jurisdiction exists if certain requirements are met. Second Circuit (2019): Those requirements aren't met. Congress (2019): What we said before but more. Second Circuit (2023): That violates due process. SCOTUS (2025): It does not. Second Circuit (2026): Okay fine, we recall our mandate from our first go at the case and affirm the judgment and jury award.
New York state prisoner arrives at a new facility with too much luggage. The extra items are legal materials he claims he has permission for. A fight ensues with prison staff which leads to disciplinary action which requires more legal materials and evidence. Which the prison denies. He's then sentenced to months of restricted confinement. Gov: There's no liberty interest here. Second Circuit: The conditions were "atypical" so there is and his due process claim can go forward.
Trainspotting offers one pathway to giving up addiction. Some prison authorities offer another. But if you're in one of their opioid-addiction programs and you're given alternative, safer opioids, then it's best to not be suspected of dealing those alternatives to other prisoners. If subsequent punishment leads to you going into withdrawal, the Third Circuit tells us it is not an Eighth Amendment violation.
Wherein the Third Circuit admonishes and sanctions an attorney in a case where the attorney's client went up against the DEA. The hallucinations at issue are not the DEA's standard fare (whether of drugs themselves or of federal drug policy) but of the AI-induced variety. Things might have gone better had the attorney not doubled down.
From the annals of "litigation takes a long time": Angola, Louisiana's notorious prison once dubbed the worst in America, saw multiple preventable deaths as a result of medical care failures, following unheeded or very belatedly heeded complaints. Inmates sued in 2015, it went to trial in 2018, and the district court entered a liability opinion in 2021 with extensive findings of Eighth Amendment violations, followed in 2023 with a remedial opinion that, among other things, established special masters for overseeing ordered improvements. Fifth Circuit (en banc) (over a dissent): Congress enacted the Prison Litigation Reform Act to rein in "judicial adventurism," and federal courts must "maintain a delicate balance among the prerogatives of public institutions, the demands of federalism, and the judiciary's limited remedial role." The remedial order doesn't do that.
Texas pretrial detainee gives birth alone in her cell two weeks before she's due; the baby doesn't make it. The jail's medical director didn't read an email that indicated the detainee had refused breakfast and was experiencing abdominal cramps that morning. Fifth Circuit: Qualified immunity. He didn't see the email, how was he to know?
Business owner slapped with a $130k restitution order in FINRA and SEC proceedings argues that the Supreme Court's 2024 decision in Jarkesy entitles him to a jury trial in an Article III court. Sixth Circuit: He forfeited that argument by failing to raise it before the SEC. Nevertheless, for the following reasons discussed over several pages, his arguments are strong . . . if only we were able to reach them. Petition for review denied.
You'll learn from the Sixth Circuit that there are long-running disputes over when and where the first Kentucky bourbon was distilled. The arguments over "when" are narrower regarding the first bourbon distilled by an African American-owned distiller. That's because the year is either 2018 or 2020, not long before one contender sued the other for false advertising regarding its firstness under the Lanham Act.
In further AI-hallucination news, the Seventh Circuit admonished—but did not sanction—an attorney who included two nonexistent sources in a brief. In her favor, she claimed she did not use AI herself (she apparently copied language from a different brief), and she apologized profusely when the court called the errors to her attention. Further, of relevance to litigators everywhere: The court cast shade on opposing counsel for not catching the errors themselves.
Police enter home and arrest a Wisconsin man based on a felony "want"—a type of alert issued by a law enforcement officer saying she believes there's enough evidence for a warrant, but without a judge actually approving one. Seventh Circuit: No matter how much you may want it otherwise, the Fourth Amendment says warrants—and a warrant requires sign-off from a "neutral and detached magistrate." Man's claim for unconstitutional entry into home may proceed. (Ed.: Federal agencies famously active in the Seventh Circuit's largest city may care to take note that warrants must come from a judge.)
Those teaching fed courts next term may be interested in a run-of-the-mill adverse-possession squabble over land in Champaign, Ill. that was removed to federal court. District court: I'll keep the issue over subpoenaing Dept. of Ag. officials as witnesses but remand the underlying dispute over building a garage. Seventh Circuit: Affirmed. Just because Congress passed a law in 1785 concerning the land where the properties are does not federal jurisdiction make.
Jury finds St. Louis city employee was unconstitutionally fired in violation of the First Amendment because she reported corruption at the city tow lot where employees were more-or-less stealing nicer cars. Eighth Circuit: Defendant forfeited qualified immunity defense by not meaningfully raising it until post-briefing 28(j) letters. Also, as you would have learned from watching Liar, Liar, "the federal rules of evidence do not offer protection against evidence that is prejudicial in the sense that it is detrimental to a party's case."
Come for the Eighth Circuit upholding a P.I. enjoining an Arkansas rule requiring a "wet signature" to register to vote. Stay for the dissent chronicling the centuries-long march from a wax-seal-based system of proving authenticity to a written-signature one.
According to its text, the Eleventh Amendment prevents suits against states in federal court by people from other states or countries. According to the courts, it prevents all kinds of other stuff. The Eighth Circuit says you can now add to that list third-party discovery propounded by the estate of a mentally ill man whose death may have been made more likely by sending in a state-owned light-armored vehicle.
During protests in Southern California against ICE tactics in summer 2025, journalists get caught in the pepper-ball crossfire. Press organizations obtain a P.I. against the feds to prevent methods where sometimes "officers issued no warnings and shot individuals who posed no threat." Ninth Circuit: With the Boston Tea Party as prologue, we agree that the plaintiffs are likely to end up victorious. But the injunction's too much; remand to redraw.
Allegation: Tulsa police officer shoots dead a non-threatening, mentally ill (or high) man who had his hands raised. District court: Right but show me a prior case that says an officer can't shoot a non-threatening, mentally ill (or high) suspect who was in an open space and slowly walking away from an officer toward a parked car while ignoring commands to kneel and then lowered one arm when he got close to the car door. Qualified immunity. Tenth Circuit: Reversed. We're not sure he lowered his arm, and anyway the prior case on point doesn't have to be that on point.
Atlanta police officer's already choppy relationship with his superiors (he previously accused them of racial discrimination) doesn't improve after he reports them for downgrading traffic tickets issued to the former mayor's grandson. One week later, the officer learns his flexible shift schedule, a privilege that he's relied on for years, will now be "fixed." He sues alleging, inter alia, First Amendment retaliation. The district court granted summary judgment for the city on all claims. Eleventh Circuit: Mostly affirmed, but a jury could find the officer's superiors had a retaliatory motive for pulling his flexible schedule, in which case they would not be entitled to QI. To a jury it goes. Affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded.
Medically complex Florida children need skilled nursing to stay out of pediatric nursing homes, but nearly 94% of them receive fewer hours than authorized. In 2013, DOJ sued, alleging discrimination under the ADA. Eleventh Circuit: The feds can sue on behalf of all affected kids, not just the one who filed an administrative complaint; risk of institutionalization (not just actual institutionalization) gives rise to Title II claims, joining six circuits over the Fifth; and system-wide injunction based on widespread violations affirmed in the main. Dissent: That overstates the circuit split and, regardless, we're on the wrong side of it.
And in en banc news, the Ninth Circuit will not reconsider (but did amend) its decision holding that the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act allows the garnishment of funds in an inmate's trust account coming from gradual accumulations from family and friends.
And in cert denial news: For nearly 20 years, a Midland County, Tex. prosecutor was arguing to put people in jail by day while secretly working as paid law clerk for the county's judges at night, drafting rulings in favor of the prosecution, including in his own cases. Per the Fifth Circuit, that's "utterly bonkers," but also not something IJ client Erma Wilson, who was wrongly convicted, can bring a civil rights claim about. This week, SCOTUS declined to take up the case. What the Heck.

Victory! On Tuesday a federal court ruled that the town of Parksley, Va., and a city councilman violated the Fourth Amendment when the councilman cut a water pipe running from the Eben-Ezer Food Truck, causing more than a thousand dollars in food spoilage and damages. The court also found the violation was so outrageous that it denied qualified immunity. The food truck's owners, Theslet Benoir and Clemene Bastien, teamed up with the Institute for Justice (IJ) to sue in January 2024, after the councilman repeatedly harassed them, cut the pipe, and, according to Theslet and Clemene, told them to "go back to your own country."

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Trump's Call for a $1.5 Trillion Military Budget Is Irresponsible, Wasteful, and Unrealistic

2026-04-03T21:58:42Z

President Donald Trump is asking Congress to spend nearly $1.5 trillion on the military next year—a 43 percent increase to the Pentagon's budget.

The White House included that massive increase in military spending in a budget request sent to Congress on Friday. It formalizes the proposal that Trump has been teasing for months. In percentage terms, it would be the largest year-over-year increase in military spending since the Korean War.

Some of the new military spending would be offset by cuts to other parts of the discretionary budget. The White House's budget proposal would trim $73 billion from other programs. Overall, the White House's budget envisions discretionary spending increasing from about $1.9 trillion to nearly $2.2 trillion next year.

Trump's proposed military budget would be "an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars and would make Americans less, not more, safe," says Ben Freeman, coauthor of The Trillion Dollar War Machine and a director at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Freeman says the proposal would encourage more aimless wars and would add to the federal government's already soaring debts.

"Fortunately, it's not going to happen," he added, noting that political and budgetary pressure make it very unlikely that Congress will be able to fulfill the White House's request. Right now, it's not even clear that Congress will approve the much smaller request for $200 billion in supplemental funding for the Iran war. "This is a negotiating tactic, not a serious request," Freeman believes.

Even so, the president has made it clear that boosting the military's budget is a top priority, even if it comes at the expense of other government programs.

While speaking at the White House this week, Trump said the military budget was his top priority. "It's not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare—all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis. You can't do it on a federal," Trump said. "We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country."

The impulse to push more responsibility to the state level is a good one, but Medicare and Medicaid will continue to be a huge part of the federal budget.

That's the real story here—and in every other debate over how much the federal government should be spending. So-called "mandatory spending" on entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will cost an estimated $4.8 trillion in fiscal year 2027, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) latest projections. Interest payments on the debt will cost another $1.1 trillion that year.

Meanwhile, the CBO expects the federal government to collect about $5.8 trillion in tax revenue that year.

It doesn't take a math whiz to see the problem here. The budget is already running a deficit before any discretionary spending, including the military, is on the table.

The White House proposes cutting hundreds of billions in spending from some discretionary programs to use for the military budget. In reality, the entirety of that $1.5 trillion proposal is being borrowed and added to the debt, because entitlement spending and payments on the national debt have effectively crowded everything else. We are putting the whole federal discretionary budget on the national credit card.

"Exploding the Pentagon budget will not make us safer. It will explode the debt. It will waste taxpayer dollars on programs that don't work or that we simply don't need," said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, in a statement on Friday. "It will crowd out funding for other national security priorities that the Pentagon doesn't address, like disaster mitigation and response, pandemic preparedness, food security, and reining in the debt."

In a historical context, Trump's military budget proposal looks less extreme. Spending $1.5 trillion on the military would mean the Pentagon consumes roughly 5 percent of America's total economic output. During the height of the Cold War, the military consumed up to 10 percent of America's gross domestic product (GDP), as advocates of a beefed-up Pentagon budget like to point out.

Of course, the rest of the government cost a lot less back then, and it wasn't spending $1 trillion to pay interest on the national debt.

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Trump's Answer to Iran's Hormuz Crisis: Sell Oil We Don't Have

2026-04-03T20:14:33Z

President Donald Trump's war of choice against Iran has already had negative consequences. Perhaps most visibly, we've seen higher gas prices after Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which 20 million barrels of crude oil once passed each day, constituting a quarter of the total global supply.

This week, Trump addressed the status of the war in a rambling, disjointed prime time speech largely free of specifics on how we would get out of the mess he got us into.

One thing he did say is that any country dependent on oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz should simply pivot and buy that oil from the U.S.

But that's not likely to happen, because we simply don't have it to spare.

"Under my leadership, we are [the] No. 1 producer of oil and gas on the planet, without even discussing the millions of barrels that we're getting from Venezuela," Trump boasted. "The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won't be taking any in the future. We don't need it."

"So to those countries that can't get fuel," he added, "I have a suggestion. No. 1, buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty. We have so much. And No. 2…go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves." (This was a slightly softer tone than he took on social media just days earlier, when he told the United Kingdom, "Go get your own oil!")

"When this conflict is over," he optimistically predicted, "the strait will open up naturally."

It is a common refrain from this administration, that the U.S. makes all the oil it needs. "Most countries in the world are significant net oil importers," Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Fox News last month. "Fortunately, the United States—we produce more oil than we consume. We're a net oil exporter."

This is not quite true—at least, not literally. And despite Trump's pledge, it doesn't mean we can start supplying the rest of the world.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), "the United States has been an annual net total energy exporter since 2019," but "U.S. crude oil imports and exports both increased in 2024, and the United States remained a net crude oil importer."

Part of the confusion stems from liquefied natural gas (LNG): The U.S. is currently the world's largest exporter of LNG. But while crude oil is refined into gasoline and diesel fuel, LNG is typically used to generate heat and electricity.

Our LNG output helps tip the balance and make us net fuel exporters, but with crude oil in particular, we still bring in more than we send out.

According to EIA statistics, in the week ending March 27, the U.S. produced about 13.66 million barrels of crude oil per day. But over that same time, we imported 6.45 million barrels per day and only exported 3.52 million—making us net importers by nearly 3 million barrels.

The reason is because not all oil is the same. "The type of oil produced in the United States tends to be higher-quality, so-called sweet oil, but domestic refineries are set up to handle heavy and sour oil," Emmett Lindner wrote at The New York Times. "It is often more cost efficient to sell the sweet and buy the heavy."

As recently as 2023, we received just over half of our oil imports from Canada.

"The amount of crude oil U.S. refineries process greatly exceeds U.S. crude oil production," requiring imports to make up the difference, adds American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a petroleum industry trade association.

In his speech, Trump noted "the millions of barrels that we're getting from Venezuela." In January, after ousting that country's leader, Trump claimed the U.S. would receive "between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels" of that country's heavy crude oil. The plan was light on specifics, but even if it's true, it does almost nothing to replace what has been disrupted in recent weeks.

Venezuela produced just over 900,000 barrels of crude per day in February—a slight improvement over the previous month. Even if Trump could lay claim to that country's entire output, it would pale in comparison to the 20 million daily barrels that until recently flowed through the Strait of Hormuz.

It makes sense that Trump would be desperate for a solution: In a CNN survey conducted before his address this week, only about a third of Americans felt he had a "clear plan," while two-thirds disapproved of the decision to pursue military action. But while a clear plan would certainly be an improvement, it should at least have some basis in reality.

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Maine Bill Proves States Are Capable of Adopting Bad Data Center Policies Without Federal Intervention

2026-04-06T15:01:41Z

Amid bipartisan backlash to AI from federal lawmakers, nearly a dozen states are considering legislation that would prohibit new data center construction for a period of months to years. Maine is poised to be the first state to pass such a bill.

On Tuesday, the Maine House of Representatives passed House Bill (H.B.) 307, largely along party lines, to prohibit "approval for the development, construction or operation of a data center with a load of 20 megawatts or more" anywhere in the state until November 2027. The bill also establishes the Maine Data Center Coordination Council, and tasks it with "protecting ratepayers, maintaining electric grid reliability, minimizing environmental impacts and enabling responsible and appropriately sited economic development."

H.B. 307 is expected to pass the Senate and be signed into law by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The bill, which was introduced in January 2025 by state Rep. Melanie Sachs (D–Freeport), chair of the Energy, Utilities, and Technology Committee, was carried over from last year's legislative session. In February, Sachs told Maine Public that the impacts that data centers have on the power grid and the environment inspired lawmakers "to take a proactive approach and do it unlike any other state has so far."

But just because states have the power to suspend data center construction doesn't mean doing so is a good idea. In fact, this precautionary approach imposes costs of its own.

State Sen. Matt Harrington (R–Sanford) said the statewide moratorium could cost his district 100 long-term jobs by shuttering the construction of a 100–300 megawatt facility that had already purchased land. The bill would stall development of the data center even though it would be powered by its own natural gas plant, reducing strain on the grid.

Still, Sachs told the Maine Morning Star that the Sanford data center, "could have serious potential impacts on Maine ratepayers [and] our electric grid." Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, tells Reason that Sachs' bill, not data centers, could actually raise electricity bills in the long run.

"Data centers are steady, long-term customers that give utilities the reliable income they need to invest in more power generation and grid upgrades, which benefits everyone," explains Chilson.

It's also worth recognizing that Sachs' panic over the environmental impacts of these facilities is overblown. As Christian Bristichgi wrote in a recent Reason cover story, "data centers consume a tiny portion of the nation's water. While they're not the prettiest buildings to look at, they mean less noise, fumes, and traffic than almost any other land use one could care to name." And as the technology improves, its environmental impacts will shrink. "In many ways this is the least efficient AI that we will ever have," says Jennifer Huddleston, senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute.

Huddleston also emphasizes that data centers are critical to existing technologies that involve cloud computing, not just AI. Adam Thierer, senior fellow at the R Street Institute, warns that blanket bans on data centers will function as "an actual Internet access kill switch" by undermining online services and raising costs.

Unfortunately, the Maine bill may be a sign of things to come. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) introduced a bill that would impose a nationwide moratorium on AI data centers until federal lawmakers implement a highly restrictive regulatory framework. His stated motivation is to, among other things, empower "communities that would be affected by the artificial intelligence data center…to approve or reject [its] construction."

Maine has demonstrated that state lawmakers are already empowered to regulate data centers. But just because they have that power doesn't mean they should use it.

The post Maine Bill Proves States Are Capable of Adopting Bad Data Center Policies Without Federal Intervention appeared first on Reason.com.

Colorado Becomes First State To Protect Defendants Against Faulty Roadside Drug Tests

2026-04-03T20:15:04Z

Colorado recently enacted a law protecting criminal defendants arrested due to roadside tests for drugs, becoming the first state in the country to recognize widespread instances of wrongful arrests due to police departments' use of unreliable drug field kits.

The Colorado House and Senate unanimously passed H.B. 26-1020 last month, and Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed it into law on March 26. Under the new statute, police can no longer make arrests solely for misdemeanor drug possession based on the results of colorimetric field drug tests and instead must issue suspects a summons to appear in court. The act also requires courts, before a defendant enters a plea in a case where a field test was used, to inform defendants of the known error rates for the tests and their right to request testing from a forensics laboratory.

The first-of-its-kind law is part of a growing bipartisan recognition of a problem that news investigations and lawsuits have documented for years: Police officers' use of unverified drug field tests is inevitably resulting in innocent people being arrested, jailed, and prosecuted.

This type of test kit uses color reactions to indicate the presence of compounds found in different narcotics. Several different companies manufacture them, and they're popular with police departments because they're cheap and portable, allowing officers to test suspected drugs on the spot and get results near instantaneously. But the problem is that the compounds the kits test for are not exclusive to illicit drugs, leading innocent people to be arrested for innocuous items. Over the years, police officers around the country have jailed innocent people after drug field kits returned "presumptive positive" results on bird poop, donut glaze, cotton candy, and sand from inside a stress ball.

The manufacturers warn that the tests should be verified by a laboratory, and they're not admissible evidence in most courts for that reason. But that's done little to protect criminal defendants from arrest and prosecution.

For example, Reason recently profiled the case of Bryan Getchius, who was wrongly arrested and charged with fentanyl trafficking after South Carolina sheriff's deputies ran multiple tests on a bottle of prescription pills in Getchius' luggage. Getchius was jailed for 15 days and held on house arrest for seven months. It would take the state forensics lab more than a year and a half to get official results back to county prosecutors showing that the "fentanyl" was in fact what the label on the bottle and imprints on the pills said: prescription medication for irritable bowel syndrome.

Getchius is now suing the sheriff's department and the county responsible for his wrongful arrest.

But it's the scope of the problem that's alarmed lawmakers and policymakers. The first effort to quantify how many wrongful arrests occur because of these tests—a 2024 study by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania—put the number at 30,000 people every year. The report estimated that the tests were used in roughly half of the 1.5 million drug arrests in the U.S. each year from 2010 to 2019.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, the executive director of the Quattrone Center, said other states should follow Colorado's lead.

"While this reform may seem small and technical, for the people impacted, it is anything but," Bushnell wrote. "For a person handcuffed, jailed or publicly accused because the field test got it wrong, the consequences are immediate and lasting. A false positive can cost someone their job, destabilize their family, interrupt their education and damage their standing in the community long before a laboratory corrects the record."

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which advocates for free-market policies at the state level, introduced a model policy in January for state legislatures limiting the use of colorimetric field tests.

"By adopting these standards, Colorado policymakers are reinforcing the foundational concept that the states' burden of proof must be founded on accurate, verifiable evidence," Nino Marchese, the director of ALEC's judiciary task force, wrote in a blog post praising the passage of Colorado's bill.

Several prison systems and police departments around the country have stopped using these kinds of field kits, but they still remain widely used by law enforcement and accepted by courts as probable cause to make an arrest.

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Does America Still Make Stuff?

2026-04-03T22:02:08Z

Why does everybody think America doesn't make stuff anymore? Where is this expressly disprovable idea dribbling in from?

Writer/Producer: Andrew Heaton
Producer: John Carter
Producer: Austin Bragg
Producer: Meredith Bragg

The post Does America Still Make Stuff? appeared first on Reason.com.

The Zendaya Romance The Drama Is Weirder and More Uncomfortable Than You Expect

2026-04-03T13:34:50Z

The first thing you need to know about The Drama is that it's not what you expect. Like really, really not what you expect.

The marketing has positioned the film as an awkward twist on the rom-com with a pair of hot young stars, Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, batting eyes at each other as they stumble and mumble their way to a wedding. It's got the A24 imprimatur and a low-light, Instagram aesthetic that suggests a skeptical, modern take on young love. It's been sold as a very conventional kind of unconventional romance.

And, well, it is that—sort of. But it's much weirder, much darker, and much more uncomfortable than you've been led to assume. It's a movie about marriage and mind games, social taboos, and the difficulty of ever knowing, much less loving, another human being. It should have been called The Psychodrama.

Zendaya and Pattinson play Emma and Charlie, a young couple living in Boston. Their relationship begins with an amusing meet-cute in a coffee shop, when Charlie pretends to like the book she's reading even though he hasn't read it. Eventually he comes clean, they move in together, and soon they're engaged.

On the cusp of their wedding, as they're trying out wedding food with another couple—the best man and maid of honor—they have a little too much to drink and decide to play a game. What's the worst thing each of them has ever done?

They all reveal something suitably awful yet sort of funny, mostly impulsive, antisocial acts from their youth. And then Emma reveals, well, something about herself. Something that no one knows how to respond to. Something that changes everything.

To say much more would be to spoil the movie's central provocation, which amounts to the breaking, or at least bending, of a major cultural taboo. Neither Charlie nor the friends know quite what to do. And what ensues is, yes, a lot of drama.

Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, whose last film was the surrealist Nic Cage picture Dream Scenario, the film traffics in a similar sort of psycho-social strangeness, with dreamlike imagery interspersing scenes of Charlie's escalating mania as he struggles to make sense of Emma's revelation.

It's a tricky tonal balance. Her confession is clearly meant to shock and upset viewers. It's also supposed to be funny. Borgli not only manages to achieve both, he often manages to achieve both at the same time, often without a single clear directive as to which is appropriate. It's a movie that's intentionally, and effectively, designed to make viewers feel emotionally confused.

That emotional confusion stems partly from a sort of social confusion, as both the characters and viewers are confronted with a scenario for which there is no clear cultural playbook. The movie seems to be reacting against the common-on-social-media notion of situations that demand a single, obvious, uniform social and emotional response. Sometimes there is no clearly correct way to respond to a difficult or upsetting event. Sometimes reality demands, or at least supports, multiple conflicting and contradictory responses.

Occasionally, the film strains credulity in its psychological complexities. There are Big Ideas that it gestures at but can't fully support. And the cringe-shock of its big reveal will almost certainly divide viewers, especially those expecting something more conventional.

But the movie's strength is in its human smallness. It never feels like a sociological treatise or a series of tweets about how We Live In a Society. Instead, it's a movie about people, and how they are strange and difficult and impossible to know. It's a movie about marriage and relationships, and how even the most intimate partnerships involve telling lies and stories about yourself, and reintroducing yourself over and over again.

It's drama. It's life. It's a pretty good movie.

The post The Zendaya Romance The Drama Is Weirder and More Uncomfortable Than You Expect appeared first on Reason.com.

Bye-Bye, Bondi

2026-04-03T13:27:37Z

Bondi out. Yesterday, after months of private complaints and rumors of tension, President Donald Trump ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi, saying that she will be taking a job in the private sector. It's not clear what the new job will be. Bondi's deputy, former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, will take over the Justice Department in an acting capacity. Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin is reportedly being looked at as a possible replacement.

The most straightforward way to understand Bondi's departure is to return to an unusual Truth Social post by Trump from September of last year. The post, directed to "Pam," was reportedly intended as a private direct message, and it gives an idea of what Trump was thinking and saying behind the scenes. The post urged the then-A.G. to move more quickly to prosecute Trump's political enemies, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James. "We can't delay any longer, it's killing our reputation and credibility," Trump wrote. "They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!"

Bondi used Justice Department muscle to pursue investigations into Trump's enemies, but it wasn't enough for Trump. As Politico notes, "Trump's second term has been marked by an unprecedented assertion of executive power. But that hasn't translated into the cascade of criminal prosecutions Trump has long demanded against his enemies."

The president saw Bondi as "weak and ineffective," according to The Wall Street Journal, because she hadn't successfully prosecuted his foes. Trump views the Justice Department as a vehicle for his personal grievances; he felt Bondi wasn't aggressive enough in driving that vehicle.

As Reason's Joe Lancaster wrote yesterday, Bondi's handling of the Epstein files was also a factor.

But even if you set aside her efforts to pursue Trump's personal grievance agenda, Bondi was not exactly a champion of American freedom, especially on issues related to speech.

She suggested that it was legal to prosecute an Office Depot employee for declining to print flyers for a Charlie Kirk memorial vigil. She made utterly bogus claims about hate speech. She once suggested that "domestic terrorists" could be characterized in part by "extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment."

Bondi was simply unmoored from any sort of coherent constitutional view of freedom of expression. That's worrying for any law enforcement official, and especially dangerous when that person is the attorney general. Federal officials should be in the business of protecting American rights and freedoms, not misconstruing them.

Tariff man. Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of what Trump once referred to as "Liberation Day"—the start of his sweeping, and often shifting, tariff regime. The initial justification for those tariffs was struck down by the Supreme Court, but Trump has plowed forward with new (also dubious) legal arguments—and new tariffs.

Yesterday, he announced that he would place tariffs up to 100 percent on some brand-name drugs, and would make further adjustments to existing tariffs on steel and aluminum. These are the first significant changes to Trump's tariff regime since the Supreme Court ruling in February.

The details are somewhat complicated. As The Wall Street Journal reports, "the consequences of the tariff changes will vary widely depending on the product." It's an understatement to say that the words "consequences" and "will vary widely" are not exactly what businesses want to hear right now.

It is worth reiterating that the sheer confusing complexity, combined with the uncertainty of constantly shifting policies, of these tariffs has been a big part of what has made these levies so costly and burdensome. When tariff policy changes repeatedly and without warning, it's very difficult for businesses to plan.

Higher costs get passed off to consumers, and trade pipelines slow down or break down. America is deeply enmeshed in the global economy; Trump's trade policies have mostly served to gum up the works.

Tech bro$. Tech industry-focused podcast TBPN sold to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, for an undisclosed sum. The Financial Times reports the sale was in the "low hundreds of millions." Reports say the deal allows TBPN to maintain full editorial independence.

The podcast, which began in 2024, broadcasts live for three hours every weekday. It has a relatively modest audience but has become influential inside the world of frontier, big-money tech, in part because it's perceived as more friendly to new tech and business building than other tech-focused outlets.

It's boosterish at times, but it's also fun, informative, and most importantly, optimistic—not just about tech, but about business and capitalism more generally.

I'm a casual fan and admirer of the show, and it's pretty clearly a response to the militantly anti-tech, anti-business attitude that so many tech-and-business-focused publications have taken over the last 15 years or so.

The show's core premise is: What if we covered technology—but didn't utterly loathe technology and everyone who makes it? Sounds crazy, but it works.

Scenes from Washington, D.C.: In January, a D.C.-area sewer line failed, resulting in a massive spill of untreated wastewater into the Potomac. D.C. Water, the utility responsible for the pipe, had previously noticed corrosion and applied to fix the sewer line.

But a Washington Post investigation finds that the project was delayed multiple times "as federal officials studied potential environmental impacts, including risks to a blue wildflower and an endangered bat species." In short, a prolonged and politicized environmental review process made it impossible to prevent an environmental disaster.

QUICK HITS

In March, U.S. employers added 178,000 jobs, according to this morning's jobs report. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3 percent. It's a strong result for an economy that has recently struggled with hiring.
The White House wants $1.5 trillion for defense spending. If approved, according to The New York Times, that would be the highest amount in modern history.
Roughly a quarter of Americans are so-called "double haters" who view both parties poorly. But when it comes time to vote, many of those haters still end up making a choice. A new CNN poll finds that "voters in that group prefer the Democrats in the upcoming midterms by 31 points."
Is big tech shifting from software to hardware?
Trump is reportedly frustrated with other members of his cabinet, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
A planning commission approved Trump's White House ballroom plans, but there are still legal hurdles following this week's judicial ruling that Congress must approve further construction. Also, the ballroom apparently sits atop a giant military bunker.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the Army's top general, along with two others.
The photos coming out of the Artemis II space mission are pretty incredible.

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The Republican Plan To Nationalize Elections Is Performative Nonsense

2026-04-02T22:02:07Z

During my younger days as a soccer dad, I got to watch the variety of ways that people handled the inevitable wins and losses. The trophy my daughter won after a big championship game is packed in a box somewhere in the garage, but the memories remain. Life is about more than winning—and indeed most people involved in the games were good sports.

But I remember some teams for which winning was everything. Their players would punch, kick, and trip our players whenever the referees weren't looking. The coaches constantly intimidated the refs. What's the likelihood that one's team is right on every single call? Not high, but these competitors never conceded anything. That experience reminds me of the modern Republican approach to elections.

Under Donald Trump's leadership, the GOP's outlook is simple: Every election they win is a reflection of the will of the people. Every election they lose is rigged. The president never conceded the 2020 election, nor apologized for the January 6 Capitol attack. That was the result of angry partisans taking seriously Trump's bogus election-fraud claims. Trump continues to push the tiresome rigged-election narrative even though he failed to win the dozens of court cases making such claims.

Lately, Republicans aren't doing well at the polls. A Democrat just won a statehouse victory to represent the Florida district that includes Mar-A-Lago. She's the 30th Democrat since 2025 to flip a seat in a heavily Republican district. That's not surprising. The party out of power often does well in special elections and midterms. Republicans have pushed an unusually divisive agenda, inflation is high, gas prices are soaring, ICE raids are frightening, and the president has launched a Middle East war. So, yeah, there's going to be electoral pushback.

Instead of moderating their policies or engaging in normal soul searching, Republicans are doubling down—and trying to nationalize elections by promoting something called the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) America Act. It would impose draconian voter-identification requirements. The bill would require voters to provide a birth certificate or passport for registration, with the potential for disenfranchising vast numbers of voters, as many Americans don't have a passport or can no longer find their birth certificate.

When Congress required a Real ID for traveling, it provided years for Americans to comply. This legislation would take effect before the midterms.

It's also a red herring. One can always find examples of illegal voting in a nation with 340 million people, but there's no evidence of widespread voting by noncitizens. Even a major MAGA-aligned think tank can only find a tiny number of incidents. (Ironically, some of the most prominent illegal-vote examples involve Republicans.) There is no voting crisis that demands federal intervention.

The legislation also takes aim at mail-in voting, which is ironic given that Trump himself used that system to cast his vote in Florida. Again, there's no evidence that vote-by-mail is any less secure than traditional in-person voting systems. Given the bill's iffy chances of passage, Republicans are cynically trying to build a case to challenge an election they believe they are going to lose. They'll blame losses on Congress' failure to fix a supposedly broken election system. It's politics as performance art. But if it does pass, it could lead to serious voter suppression.

Our Constitution—you know, the document that Republicans continually attack—gives state legislatures the primary power to determine the election ground rules, although it does provide Congress with a role. There's certainly no role for presidential executive orders, as the president prefers. As the Institute for Responsive Government notes, the nation's decentralized election system also makes a federal takeover impractical. The current process, run by local civil servants, is designed to make it harder for fraudsters and partisans to engage in shenanigans. Conservatives used to understand that federalism is one of the core founding principles that protects our freedoms, but not any more.

Of course, Democrats have in the past also tried to nationalize elections, with one onerous example occurring during the Biden administration. I grew up in Philadelphia, which is known for the election antics of its Democratic political machine. But the answer isn't for Republicans to one-up those efforts with their own election-rigging measure.

Unfortunately, we've reached a situation best described by the New America group: "When two-party competition becomes an existential zero-sum contest over the rules of the game itself, the incentive shifts from persuading voters to controlling the machinery of voting." I have no real problem with Voter ID if it boosts Americans' confidence in elections, but this measure would erode trust in the process. Trump has been disturbingly clear that this isn't about creating better elections. He's trying to control the voting machinery to achieve his desired results.

Like with soccer, playing dirty only undermines the sanctity of the game. In democracies, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But if the GOP succeeds with its Trump-inspired dirty tricks, then we're all at risk of losing our democracy.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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Today in Supreme Court History: April 3, 1962

2025-07-09T17:59:15Z

4/3/1962: Engel v. Vitale argued.

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Review: Church Committee Report on Illegal Spying Is Relevant Again in the Trump Era

2026-03-27T17:32:22Z

It's not a good sign when a 50-year-old Senate committee report on illegal government activities is relevant and timely enough for a new release. The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State has, alas, arrived at the right political moment. This new, abridged version of the infamous 1976 report appears as the Trump administration pursues retaliatory investigations into political opponents and so-called domestic terrorists.

The committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D–Idaho), was formed after Watergate to answer basic questions about domestic surveillance: Who was the government spying on? How was it spying? What was it doing with the information? And was it following the law?

"The answer to each of these questions is disturbing," the report concluded. "Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power."

The report aired some of the FBI and CIA's dirtiest laundry, including illegal wiretapping, unethical medical experiments, and covert programs to disrupt lawful political organizing. As the editors of this new edition—the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Matthew Guariglia and Georgetown's Brian Hochman—write in their preface, "No government document has done more to expose the mechanisms behind America's aspirations of political supremacy in the twentieth century."

Guariglia and Hochman have stripped the 3,100-page report down to its core revelations, along with case studies on such scandals as the FBI's blackmail operation against Martin Luther King Jr. This new edition will be an eye-opener for anyone who's not paranoid enough yet.

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Review: Flavor-Changing Gum Is Finally a Reality

2026-03-25T14:00:55Z

Willy Wonka's "three-course dinner gum" captured my imagination when I first saw the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a kid. Violet Beauregarde—one of the many unappealing children in the film and the Roald Dahl book it was based on—steals and consumes the gum, which tastes like tomato soup, roast beef, and blueberry pie.

When I heard that flavor-changing gum approaching that fantasy was now real, I hoped to achieve my lifelong goal of becoming Beauregarde. But 5 GUM Evolution Sour to Sweet Berry Flavor Changing Sugar Free Chewing Gum ain't it. The only thing it has in common with Wonka's gum is that the berry flavor at the end is wildly out of control to the point it becomes quite unpleasant for the chewer and everyone around them.

We live in a time where science increasingly approximates magic, but "three-course dinner gum" is a milestone in food science we have yet to reach.

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Brickbat: Dangerous Hurry

2026-04-02T03:35:43Z

Prosecutors have charged former Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) Police Officer Deion Alexander with multiple traffic-related offenses, including first-degree vehicular homicide and reckless driving, following an on-duty crash that killed a pedestrian in February. At the time, Alexander was responding to a distress call from a fellow officer. Police say that on the way, he drove through 11 red lights in just 93 seconds, and traffic camera footage shows he entered an intersection against a red light and drove into oncoming traffic, causing a crash that killed one person and injured others. Investigators say he was using his lights and sirens but still drove too recklessly, and he has been fired. "Just having the blue lights and sirens on doesn't give you carte blanche to run through an intersection without slowing down or yielding," said MARTA Police Chief Scott Kreher.

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Open Thread

2026-04-03T07:00:00Z

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The President Told The AG She Would Be Fired During The Car Ride To SCOTUS

2026-04-03T06:35:21Z

April 1, 2026 was an even busier day than I expected. The New York Times reports:

On Wednesday, the 60-year-old Ms. Bondi, downcast but determined, joined Mr. Trump for a glum crosstown drive to the Supreme Court, where they watched arguments in the birthright citizenship case. In the car, Mr. Trump told her it was time for a change at the top of the Justice Department.

Ms. Bondi hoped to save her job or, at the very least, buy a little more time — until the summer — to give herself a graceful exit.

She ended up with neither, and grew emotional Wednesday in conversations with friends and colleagues after she realized she was out. The next morning, Mr. Trump made it official, and fired her via social media post.

Bondi then sat next to Trump for nearly an hour. Several reports indicated that Trump sat emotionless during the oral argument. But what was Bondi's demeanor?

Life comes at you fast.

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The World Bank Used To Champion Markets. Now It's Surrendering to State-Led Industrialization.

2026-04-02T21:31:49Z

The World Bank recently published a 276-page report supporting the idea that industrial policy belongs "in the national policy toolkit of all countries." This is a significant reversal for an institution that spent decades pushing developing nations toward fiscal discipline, open trade, and market liberalization. When the World Bank seems more interested in engaging with right- and left-wing populism than in promoting good economics, it tells you a lot about the era in which we live.

Industrial policy refers to government officials channeling resources to particular industries that the market would not. Arguments like national security or protecting "strategic" industries from competitors are often used to justify the policy. Whatever one thinks of these excuses, industrial policy is funded by taxpayers when the chosen instrument is subsidies, funded by consumers when the tool is tariffs, and always funded by the other domestic firms quietly crowded out as capital flows toward their politically favored competitors.

Every dollar directed by bureaucratic decree is a dollar that's no longer directed by people spending their money on what most deserves it. Which, of course, is what makes markets work.

To be clear, the World Bank's reversal wasn't because a new generation of economists finally cracked open the historical record and discovered that state-led industrialization works. It's because the World Bank's most powerful shareholders, the United States and Western Europe, turned toward openly and aggressively practicing industrial policy.

With a cascade of green industrial subsidies during the Biden and Obama administrations, and protectionist tariffs and "golden shares" under the Trump administration, it became impossible to lecture developing countries about the dangers of letting governments pick winning businesses. In other words, the intellectual reversal followed the political reversal, not the other way around.

The World Bank's report thus exists as a manual for governments that are going to do industrial policy regardless of what anyone tells them. It starts with the acknowledgment that all 183 countries surveyed boost at least one industry. But it stops arguing about whether industrial policy is legitimate and instead tries to diagnose which tools governments are capable of using without doing more harm than good. Mapping 15 different policy instruments along a spectrum from simple and low-risk to complex and demanding, the report warns governments repeatedly against blunt instruments that are politically easy but economically costly and urges governments to listen.

They won't listen, and here's why.

The report acknowledges that governments regularly botch industrial policy, yet it expresses hope that rising global education levels are giving more countries the human capital to make certain tools work. For example, a software tax exemption in Romania succeeded partly because a critical mass of people was now capable of becoming software engineers. Fair enough.

But while education raises the ceiling on what is theoretically achievable, it does nothing by itself to change a government's incentives. The obstacle has never primarily been a shortage of capable technocrats or populations. The real hindrances are well documented, structural, and bipartisan.

The first obstacle is what economists call the "knowledge problem." As the Cato Institute's Scott Lincicome notes, centralized attempts to identify critical technologies repeatedly fail because governments cannot predict which will end up being most valuable or how markets will develop. In the 1990s, governments picked the right industries—semiconductors and supercomputers—but the wrong products and companies. No amount of educational attainment by bureaucracies or workers solves this. Only markets aggregate untold amounts of economic knowledge through rough, supply-and-demand responsive prices and voluntary exchange.

The report never grapples with this, suggesting tools like industrial parks aimed at coordination failures and skills-development programs aimed at under-investments in human capital. Someone must still decide where the park goes and which skills get funded for which sectors. These are predictions about what the economy will need, made by the same officials facing the same information constraints as any other planner. They are dressed in more sophisticated language than a tariff but are no less vulnerable to being wrong.

The second obstacle is politics. Educated people, bureaucrats, and CEOs operate under and inside governments where industries lobby, ministers have constituencies, and failing programs are far easier to throw more money at than to kill. The World Bank's report concedes as much in calling the bluntest instruments "notoriously difficult to unwind." But that's not a technical or educational problem; it's a political one.

Even in a country as educated as the U.S., a steel industry that has enjoyed decades of political protection does not quietly accept a withdrawn subsidy. It assumes the role of political actor, pressuring politicians for more. As protectionism dulls the industry's genuine competitiveness, politics matter even more. This is bad even for nations rich enough to shoulder the cost.

The World Bank spent 276 pages telling governments how to do more of what governments most want to do but rarely do well. For developing nations, it's like receiving a lifejacket that works better for people who already know how to swim and can afford to paddle around.

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Pam Bondi's Loyalty to Trump Wasn't Enough To Save Her Job

2026-04-03T21:56:56Z

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he is replacing Pam Bondi as U.S. attorney general.

"Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year," he wrote on Truth Social. He added that she would "be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future," and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche would take over as acting attorney general.

Despite Trump's kind words and assurance that "we love Pam," Bondi has been fired, as news outlets reported was imminent.

Bondi ultimately became the face of a persistent scandal about the government's files on deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and though she was one of Trump's most vocal supporters, it wasn't enough to keep her job.

As the nation's highest law enforcement officer, Bondi was a vociferous booster of Trump's agenda. During a televised Cabinet meeting in May 2025, Bondi sang the president's praises to the cameras, bragging that in just his first few weeks back in office, Department of Justice (DOJ) seizures of illicit fentanyl had "saved…258 million lives."

The claim was ludicrous, seemingly assuming all seized fentanyl would otherwise have been divided equally among 258 million people with no opioid tolerance, who would each take the entire dose at once. But it served the purpose of fulsomely defending her boss and pursuing his priorities, which Bondi did throughout her tenure in office.

While nobody would ever confuse government attorneys with saints, Bondi's DOJ gained a reputation for pursuing Trump's personal grievances above all else.

With Bondi at the helm, DOJ attorneys pursued indictments against Trump's enemies, and those who didn't were quickly replaced with less qualified toadies. When Trump tried to circumvent federal law that kept him from installing U.S. attorneys in a long-term capacity without Senate confirmation, Bondi went along, firing the legal replacements so Trump could reappoint his picks.

That level of disdain apparently carried over into the courtroom. "The arguments that are being made…by the Department of Justice attorneys under Pam Bondi are contemptuous," former 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig said in October. "Not just of the Constitution and the rule of law, but contemptuous of the federal courts, and even, if not especially, contemptuous of the individual judges that are hearing the cases."

Former U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner added, "It's not just an issue of the arguments they're making. They're lying. They are misrepresenting things."

But ultimately, it was Epstein that Bondi's career apparently couldn't survive.

Epstein died in custody in 2019, and conspiracy theories have persisted ever since. On the campaign trail, Trump suggested he would release federal documents on Epstein's case, including a long-rumored client list.

In February 2025, when Fox News asked about releasing "the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients," Bondi replied, "It's sitting on my desk right now to review." The DOJ later walked back Bondi's comments in July when it announced there was no Epstein "client list."

"She was saying the entirety of all of the paperwork, all of the paper in relation to Jeffrey Epstein's crimes," not a particular client list, explained White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Bondi couldn't escape that unforced error. In subsequent congressional hearings, both Democrats and Republicans excoriated her for her apparent lack of transparency, and Bondi never quite came up with an acceptable answer. Testifying before the House in February, she tried to deflect from Democrats' questions about the Epstein files by, perplexingly, pointing to the stock market.

"The Dow is over 50,000 right now" and the Nasdaq is "smashing records," she said. "That's what we should be talking about."

Ultimately, this was not enough for her to keep her job. "Trump had grown 'more and more frustrated' with Bondi, one person familiar with White House deliberations said, adding that while he likes her as a person, he doesn't think she 'executed on his vision' in the way that he wanted," reported NBC News. "Since the Jeffrey Epstein files saga, Bondi had struggled to regain her footing with the president and deliver wins."

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Alabama Birthing Center Regulations Are Nearly Impossible To Comply With. State Supreme Court Could Intervene.

2026-04-02T22:18:13Z

The Alabama Supreme Court could soon hear a case to determine the future of birthing centers in the state.

In 2023, the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) proposed setting strict requirements on the state's birthing centers. By regulating them as hospitals, the rule would require these centers to have a physician or consultant physician on staff, as well as a registered nurse and board-certified midwife. Birthing centers would also have to be within a 30-minute drive of a hospital.

The rule was quickly challenged by a group of Alabama birthing centers represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The plaintiffs argued that the rule created a de facto ban on birthing centers in the state (because the ADPH refused to issue new licenses) and violated their constitutional rights, as well as the rights of their patients. The suit also argued that the ADPH exceeded its statutory authority in making the rule. Under Alabama law, the agency is allowed to regulate general and specialized hospitals, rehab facilities, and abortion and reproductive centers, among others. It makes no mention of birthing centers. Any ambiguity on the question seemed to have been settled in 2017. That year, the Legislature authorized certified midwives to attend home births independently and "did not authorize ADPH to license or regulate that care—which involves the same midwifery care and patient populations as [freestanding birthing centers]," says the ACLU.

In a 2023 complaint filed before an Alabama circuit court, the plaintiffs provided several practical issues with the ADPH's rules. One birthing center in rural Sumter County would have to close or relocate because it is 12 miles "farther from the closest hospital-based labor and delivery care than permitted under the proposed regulations." Another center would have to undergo costly and extensive renovations to comply with the new rule.

As Victoria Tice, a doula in Huntsville, recently told WSFA 12 News, the rules would require birthing centers to meet standards that do not reflect how birth centers function. "For example, the width of doorways for hospital beds to fit through when hospital beds don't exist in birthing centers and width of hallways and specific equipment that is not necessary to attend low intervention physiological birth."

The circuit court sided with the plaintiffs in 2025 and struck down the rule, which the court said was "beyond the scope of ADPH's statutory authority to license and regulate 'hospitals.'" However, in January 2026, an appeals court reversed this decision and allowed the ADPH rule to stand.

Now, the group is appealing this decision to the state's high court. "If the Alabama Supreme Court decides to hear this case and sets aside the appellate decision, it would permanently protect the ability of freestanding birth centers across the state to continue providing essential midwifery care to their communities," said the ACLU in a recent press release.

If the state Supreme Court sides with the ADPH, however, Alabamians can expect birthing center services to get more expensive and their care more sparse, which would be devastating for the nearly 60 percent of Alabama counties that lack "any hospital-based obstetrical care."

"It shouldn't be this hard to give birth safely in the state of Alabama, and it doesn't have to," Whitney White, the ACLU's lead counsel on the case, told WSFA 12 News.

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Satanic Temple Wins Legal Fight Over 10 Commandments Monument in Arkansas

2026-04-02T20:33:43Z

The Satanic Temple scored a legal victory on Tuesday when a federal judge ruled that Arkansas must remove a Ten Commandments monument from its state Capitol. The ruling comes after a nearly decade-long battle over the religious display on government grounds.

In 2017, the Arkansas Capitol erected the privately donated monument after the state's Legislature passed the Ten Commandments Monument Display Act, which authorized the installation. In response to the religious display (which was originally destroyed by a man unaffiliated with The Satanic Temple and installed again in 2018), The Satanic Temple offered to install its own statue, a 7.5-foot-tall bronze statue of Baphomet, a goat-headed creature with wings and an Iggy Pop–inspired human chest. In 2018, the group temporarily brought Baphomet to the state Capitol on a forklift to protest what they argued was unequal treatment by the state. If the Ten Commandments could be displayed on government property, the group argued, then why not show off Baphomet too?

A rally organizer explained, "If you're going to have one religious monument up then it should be open to others, and if you don't agree with that then let's just not have any at all."

The Satanic Temple's offer to privately donate Baphomet was ultimately rejected, prompting it to join the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Ten Commandments Monument Display Act.

Tuesday's ruling by District Judge Kristine G. Baker sided with The Satanic Temple, along with the American Humanist Association, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers. Baker ruled that the installation of the Ten Commandments Monument "conveys a message that the Christian religion is favored, and the Display Act is coercive in violation of the Establishment Clause."

She also noted that The Satanic Temple was "prevented from competing with Christianity on an equal footing for placement of its Baphomet monument on State Capitol grounds," which meant the state had also violated the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

Baker's ruling orders Arkansas Secretary of State Cole Jester to remove the Ten Commandments statue "immediately," but the order is on hold pending a potential appeal. Jester has already said that his team is "working closely with the Attorney General's Office to protect [the] critical part of the Capitol in the courts," reported the Arkansas Advocate.

Former Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert (R–Conway), who originally sponsored the monument, said the ruling during Holy Week was a "slap in the face" to Jews and Christians. He vowed that he, along with the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, would continue to fight the ruling.

For now, The Satanic Temple is celebrating the win. The group's website says the case "will have reverberations far and wide, validating the fundamental strength of our arguments and mission."

The Baphomet saga is just one of the ways The Satanic Temple has sought to "defend pluralism" and challenge Christian hegemony in America. The Temple first garnered national attention in 2013 for trolling former Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott over his support for prayer in Florida's public schools. The same year, Temple members held a "pink mass" to criticize Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps. In the made-up ritual, same-sex couples kissed over the grave of Phelps' mother, which The Satanic Temple claimed would turn Phelps' mother gay in the afterlife. In 2014, members attempted to host a "black mass" at Harvard University, which prompted protests by outraged Catholic groups.

In 2019, Penny Lane, the director of Hail Satan?, which chronicles The Satanic Temple's many media stunts, told Reason that despite being founded "as a prank," The Satanic Temple has "very quickly gained a huge amount of authentic followers."

"They're not going to stop," Lane said. "I think most politicians are just kind of like, 'If we wait this out, they'll go away.' And I'm telling you, they're not going away."

Tuesday's decision seems to confirm Lane's prediction.

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My Amicus Brief in the Geofence Warrant Case, United States v. Chatrie

2026-04-02T20:27:12Z

Yesterday, I submitted this brief as amicus curiae in United States v. Chatrie, the Supreme Court's case on the Fourth Amendment implications of geofencing and geofence warrants. You can get all of the briefs and materials in the case here. I'll probably blog about the case over the next few weeks, but for now I just wanted to flag my amicus brief. Here's the Summary of Argument:

The challenge of new technology is a recurring theme in Fourth Amendment law. This case raises a host of new and important questions, and this brief hopes to help frame the issues and provide directions for answering them.

The first set of questions considers whether obtaining Chatrie's Location History records was a Fourth Amendment "search" of his "papers." There are two different arguments to evaluate. The first is the virtual private locker question. Did Chatrie store his Location History records in a virtual private locker with Google, such that he had Fourth Amendment rights in the contents of the virtual locker just as he would with an equivalent physical locker? This brief concludes that the answer is likely no. Although the record is murky on the point, Chatrie likely lacked the control over the records needed to have Fourth Amendment rights in them.

The second search argument considers whether Chatrie had Fourth Amendment rights under the limits placed on the third-party doctrine by Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018). This brief argues that he did not. Carpenter does not apply because Chatrie voluntarily opted in to have Google create and store his Location History records.

The next set of issues considers the lawfulness of the warrant, assuming that one was needed. The brief argues that a properly drawn geofence warrant can satisfy the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment does not present an all or nothing choice between zero protection and absolute protection. Where the law requires a warrant, it also provides a means to draft a lawful warrant.

On the specifics of the warrant in this case, the warrant was properly drawn as to Step 1 because it was sufficiently narrow in both time and space. The constitutionality of the warrant at Step 2 is uncertain, however. It is not clear that the Fourth Amendment allows multi-stage warrants, and the particularity of Step 2 debatable. Chatrie may not have raised these issues as to Step 2, however, so they may be waived.

The fact that this case reaches the Court so late in the Term, and that it raises so many complex issues, suggests that there may be value in pointing to a resolution that might plausibly reach consensus. If so, amicus suggests that the Court might want to resolve this case by focusing primarily on the warrant issues. The legality of the warrant implicates fewer contested questions and has a more complete factual record. For the sake of completeness, however, this brief covers both issues.

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Infographic: Who Really Pays for Tariffs? These Scholars Tracked a Bottle of Wine To Find Out.

2026-04-03T20:37:51Z

Adani Samat/Reason/Envato/Midjourney

As many Americans have learned over the past year since "Liberation Day," tariffs can warp supply chains in a variety of ways.

Most importantly, they raise prices for consumers. In fact, consumers end up paying the full cost of a tariff and then some.

That's according to a recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that tracked how tariffs impact producers, importers, distributors, and consumers. To do that, the paper's five authors tracked a single bottle of imported wine as it moved through the global supply chain.

Consider it a boozy, tariff-themed recreation of "I, Pencil."

What they found is that foreign producers absorb some of the cost of a tariff by reducing prices. That's an argument that President Donald Trump and his allies have made: that foreign companies "eat" the cost of a tariff and reduce prices to remain competitive.

However, the researchers found that consumers ended up paying higher prices anyway. "Our main finding is that the markups along a distribution chain make it possible for the consumer to fully pay for the cost of the tariffs in dollar terms even when the foreign supplier partially absorbs the tariff by lowering its price," they conclude.

Here's how that happens:

Adani Samat/Reason/Envato/Midjourney

The study began with a bottle of wine that, before tariffs, would have been exported for $5 and would have cost an American consumer $23 on a liquor store shelf.

After a 25 percent tariff on wine was implemented, the researchers found that exporters would reduce their prices. The $5 bottle of wine now gets exported for an average price of $4.74, which means the producer is losing 26 cents per bottle.

When the wine is imported to the U.S., a 25 percent tariff is applied to the price. The government makes $1.19 per bottle, and the cost is passed down the supply chain.

Taxes and other markups apply, just as they did before the tariff was in effect. After those are taken into account, the retail price of that same bottle of wine is now, on average, $1.59 higher than it was before the tariff.

As a result, "tariff revenue for this particular tariff event was more than fully offset by increases in consumer prices," the authors conclude. Consumers end up paying an average of 134 percent of the tariff increase, even though foreign producers lowered their prices.

The study illustrates a key economic problem with tariffs. They make almost every party in the transaction worse off. Producers lose out by lowering export prices, and consumers are harmed by higher retail prices.

Only the government, which now gets to collect more taxes, comes out ahead.

The post Infographic: Who Really Pays for Tariffs? These Scholars Tracked a Bottle of Wine To Find Out. appeared first on Reason.com.

The Daily Mail's Dishonesty About Charlie Kirk's Alleged Killer

2026-04-03T01:41:39Z

Earlier this week, the Daily Mail published the following headline: "Bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did NOT match rifle allegedly used by suspect Tyler Robinson, new court filing claims."

That may strike the casual reader as a significant finding and one that casts doubt on whether the authorities have apprehended the correct person. Connecting Robinson's gun to the crime is obviously a key piece of evidence. If the bullet that killed Kirk came from some other gun, which is implied by this headline, then the conspiracy theories advanced by Candace Owens and others suddenly seem more plausible.

Right on cue, Owens shared the story, claiming vindication.

Where are all my neocons who have been "overwhelmed" by the non existent evidence against Tyler Robinson?

You should all be ashamed of yourselves. Hope the money was worth your soul. https://t.co/C88xGoigdR

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 31, 2026

Where to begin? This headline is woefully dishonest and clearly intended to generate massive numbers of clicks from gullible people. But the actual news is much less sensational: A report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives failed to match a recovered bullet fragment to the gun in Robinson's possession. This is not all that noteworthy. The bullet that killed Kirk did not exit his body, rendering it "more of a fragment, not a round," according to NewsNation's Jennifer Coffindaffer, a retired FBI agent. In other words, it was not necessarily expected that the bullet fragment would match the weapon. A nonmatch signifies an inconclusive result, not that the bullet is provably from some other gun.

If this were the only piece of evidence against Robinson, I suppose I could understand why it might give people pause. But the case against Robinson is extremely solid because he confessed to his family and his roommate/lover. Indeed, the prosecution plans to call his father and ex-roommate to testify against him. The prosecution possesses text messages that Robinson sent to his roommate in which he explains in detail why and how he committed the murder. Robinson is entitled to the presumption of innocence and should have every opportunity to defend himself, but people who seriously doubt that he's the killer are deluding themselves.

I'm aware that it's no use arguing with Owens. But in theory, at least, the Daily Mail's editors should be capable of feeling shame over this.

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Justice Department Drops 23,000 Cases To Make Room for Trump's Immigration Crackdown

2026-04-02T18:32:30Z

In the first six months of President Donald Trump's second term, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has closed over 23,000 criminal cases while shifting resources to immigration, according to a new ProPublica analysis. The majority of these cases, the analysis found, were closed without prosecution, further calling into question the Trump administration's commitment to the rule of law.

In February 2025, within weeks of Attorney General Pam Bondi being sworn in, the DOJ declined to prosecute nearly 11,000 cases, ProPublica found. The number of declined prosecutions is higher than any other month as far back as 2004 and is nearly double the previous high of around 6,500 declined cases during Trump's first term in September 2019.

When compared to the average of the last three administrations, ProPublica found that the second Trump administration has refused to prosecute more cases across a wide variety of crimes. Interestingly, crime categories with above-average declinations include areas that Trump has often spoken of as high priorities for his administration, including a 45 percent increase in dropped drug cases, a 59 percent increase in dropped white-collar crime cases, and a 93 percent increase in dropped national security cases.

The one area in which ProPublica found that the DOJ took on more cases than the last three administrations was immigration. During the first six months of Trump's second term, the agency declined to prosecute 22 percent fewer immigration cases than average and prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases, almost three times the number under the Biden administration and a 15 percent increase compared to Trump's first term.

Although the DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for a variety of reasons and makes policy changes to reflect differing priorities between administrations, the report suggests that the extent of declined cases and priority overhaul is unprecedented. In a statement to ProPublica, a DOJ spokesperson said the number of declined cases is due to "an effort to clean, remediate, and validate data in U.S. Attorney's cases management system," and that the agency "remains committed to investigating and prosecuting all types of crime to keep the American people safe." At the time of publication, the DOJ had not responded to Reason's request for comment.

But critics of the recent DOJ changes, including 295 former employees, say the agency is no longer fulfilling its mission "to uphold the rule of law, to keep our country safe, and to protect civil rights." Although the shift to focus on immigration is unsurprising given Trump's ongoing and unpopular immigration crackdown, the administration's decision to trade off against prosecuting other major crimes is perplexing, particularly as state law enforcement agencies are also being incentivized to focus their limited time and resources on immigration enforcement.

Data have repeatedly debunked the Trump administration's claim that it is arresting and detaining "the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens." According to an analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, only 5 percent of immigrant detainees from October to mid-November of last year had a violent criminal conviction, and 73 percent had no criminal conviction at all. Similarly, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that nearly 74 percent of over 68,000 immigrants detained in early February had no criminal convictions.

Of course, Trump is not the first president to shift the priorities of federal law enforcement. Several presidents, for example, have chosen to more strictly enforce drug laws, a tactic that has fallen well short of its intended aim. But just as empowering the government to go after drug crimes has hurt civil liberties and failed to make Americans safer, Trump's immigration crackdown is having the same effect.

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A new report on section 702 of FISA from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board

2026-04-02T17:59:56Z

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Protection Board (PCLOB) has just released a comprehensive staff report on section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Since Congress must reauthorize section 702 or let it die this month, the report could hardly be more timely. And its conclusions make a strong case for reauthorizing the provision.

The report reaffirms the value of section 702 intelligence, including queries seeking information on US persons. The PCLOB learned of a number of threats to human life and infrastructure that were thwarted by data gleaned from US person inquiries; more generally, almost two-thirds of the President's Daily Brief contained section 702 information in 2025.
Compliance is much improved. Targeting compliance continues to flirt with perfection, with compliance rates over 99%. In past reviews of the program, FBI compliance with the US person query rules has been a sore spot. It has triggered heavy Congressional criticism and numerous reforms. The PCLOB reports that the FBI has implemented all of the most recent query rules with 98.5% compliance, and that FBI US person inquiries have continued to drop dramatically, from about 57,000 in 2023 to 7400 in 2025. The PCLOB infers from the decline that statutory and administrative changes are deterring unnecessary queries, but it also raises a concern that the reforms may have made FBI agents reluctant to conduct proper US person queries.

The report is also a fount of information about how section 702 and the statutory changes adopted in 2024 are working.

It demystifies the debate over an FBI filtering tool. The dropdown menu allowed agents to narrow their queries to focus on particular participants, some of whom might be US persons. Narrowing the data in this way was not originally seen as a separate query but DOJ has concluded it should be. Use of the tool now is recorded and restricted as though it constitutes multiple separate queries.
It reports on implementation of the expanded definition of "electronic communications service providers" who must intercept communications under 702. The change was made necessary by a narrow FISA court ruling that excluded important intermediaries that have emerged in recent years. Opponents claimed that the new definition would be used to impose intercept obligations on a range of Mom-and-Pop companies; DOJ assured the PCLOB that the expanded definition is being applied only to services that the ruling had unexpectedly put off limits.
In a section rendered somewhat opaque by classified information rules, the report questions whether the intelligence community is fully carrying out the intent behind Congress's expansion of border vetting using section 702. On the one hand, it notes the intelligence community's view that the expanded focus on drug trafficking has had a "monumental" and "unparalleled" impact on the government's ability to identify transnational criminal activity. On the other hand, it notes that the rules for vetting individuals have not fundamentally changed; in general NSA only disseminates US person information in response to vetting inquiries if the information is necessary to protect against terrorism or drug trafficking and "reasonably believed to contain significant foreign intelligence information." These limitations were imposed after an amicus focused the FISA court's attention on the risk that vetting would lead to disclosure of US persons' identities. I fear the limits may be overkill in the vetting context. If there is evidence in intelligence files that someone seeking to enter the country is tied to an American engaged in drug smuggling, does the American's name have significant foreign intelligence value? If it doesn't, should the information be withheld from border authorities? These are hard questions, and it's not clear how Congress intended them to be answered. Given the limits imposed by its classified nature, I'm not sure we even have enough facts to debate them.
According to the report, other reforms from 2024 are being carried out without much drama:
- An FBI internal office now reviews all US person queries and a sample of other queries
- DOJ also audits every FBI query for US person information on a weekly basis
- FBI personnel now get training on 702 rules every year
- FBI agents face additional penalties for negligence and misconduct in making or approving US person queries, and the bonuses and promotions of field office leaders depend in part on their office's 702 compliance record.
- Amici now comment on all annual certifications of the section 702 procedures (it was this amicus participation that led to additional restrictions on US person disclosures during border vetting)
- Members of Congress now have some access to FISA court proceedings, but as the PCLOB notes disputes remain over the constraints imposed by DOJ on that access

All in all, the PCLOB report provides a detailed picture of section 702 as it stands today. It may be particularly valuable to members of Congress who didn't want to support reauthorization without an assurance that this administration was implementing the 2024 act's reforms in good faith. The PCLOB report leaves little doubt on that score.

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